You Can Now Earn Bitcoin for Listening to Podcasts

The podcasting revenue model is getting a Bitcoin facelift.

Looking to expand its footprint beyond gaming, mobile payment firm ZEBEDEE announced Tuesday its partnership with the “listen-to-earn” podcast platform Fountain to give listeners and podcasters the ability to earn Bitcoin using the app.

“With this partnership, we’re supporting a new type of business model and economic activity, not just for the payments space, but in general,” ZEBEDEE’s chief strategy officer Ben Cousens said in a statement.

Launched in October 2019, ZEBEDEE is a Bitcoin-centric gaming firm that releases games through its mobile app. ZEBEDEE recently launched two new play-to-earn games, Bitcoin Chess and Bitcoin Scratch, a digital scratch-card game with mobile game studio Viker.

With play-to-earn games, a user plays online games and receives rewards with real-world value. Listen-to-earn aims to do something similar for podcasters, creating a direct link between podcasters and their audience and letting listeners earn Bitcoin for every minute they tune in.

Instead of an expensive and sweeping ad campaign, the listen-to-earn model aims to only spend money on listeners who actually want to listen.

“When money moves as seamlessly as information, or in this case, audio, it just opens up a world of possibilities, and we’re happy to be pioneering what that means in the podcasting space alongside Fountain,” Cousens said.

Fountain, ZEBEDEE and ‘listen-to-earn’

Fountain launched its listen-to-earn program in June 2022.

The program allows listeners and podcasters to get rewarded for the value they provide. Fountain users will earn money for their first hour of daily podcast listening.

To draw in listeners, the platform uses RSS feeds to make podcasts from other platforms available to its listeners. Using the Fountain app to listen to their favorite podcast, users earn small amounts of Bitcoin, called sats or satoshis, after the creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto.

When the user is ready to cash out, they connect to the ZEBEDEE app to withdraw.

“This type of Value for Value exchange is the future of content creation,” Fountain’s founder and CEO Oscar Merry said in a press release.

“A few years from now, we’ll look back at when we paid subscriptions for content platforms that aren’t related to how much we actually use those platforms and laugh at how basic and inefficient it was,” he said.