Good Morning Everyone,
Over the last few days I’ve been playing around with a podcasting 2.0 app called fountain. The app has a slick and familiar UI, and offers a custodial lightning wallet built into the app. While this is suboptimal ultimately, in order to onboard people initially and get people playing with the app it is likely the right move in the short term. For a fully noncustodial solution i recommend checking out BREEZ.
Having an alternative business model to that of the advertising model is essential to better align the incentives of content creators. When you consider that free-to-air legacy media is simply an advertising machine, it makes sense why the content becomes more and more sensational, as the more eye balls they have, the more ad revenue they accumulate. It’s not about truth. It’s about attention. The “news” is a shitcoin.
As i discussed previously when writing about podcasting 2.0:
“The primary difference here is that these centralized platforms are typically advertising machines; and advertising, if personalized, entails surveillance. The ability to pay for content you value, in a value-4-value model, via a censorship resistant protocol seems like an obvious way forward.”
While fountain itself is just a company building an app utilising lightning for payments and the existing RSS feeds for the content, the actual monetary medium of bitcoin most certainly is, and it’s integrated right into the app. Whats super cool about fountain, is that while they try to attract users to the app they are paying people to listen. So you literally earn sats to listen to something you would listen to anyway, and then get the chance to have a play with the app and stream some sats to people who’s content has provided you value. Win/win.
This is a phenomenal way to onboard users, and to get people playing with lighting and to begin to expose the power and capability lightning offers. I’ve been streaming sats all morning, and it’s a phenomenal way to connect with content creators you appreciate and build community.
Below are a few images of the app interface. You can find the audio from these letters in there by searching for bitcoin unlocked, and earn some sats for listening. I’ve also attached a referral link to sign up with. @andrewkeir-d79ab36451
It’s early days in respect to podcasting 2.0 but the ability of lightning to facilitate peer-to-peer transactions is incredibly powerful. It’s clear as day that the old model relying on advertising corrupts the incentives and ultimately leads to censorship and surveillance (just look at youtubes censorship), however it’s likely to take some time for people to get used to paying for content they value as opposed to it being subsidised by advertisers but in my opinion this is a powerful step in the right direction. I highly encourage you to download the app, subscribe to bitcoin unlocked, and have a play around with earning and streaming some sats to get a feel for the power the value4value model can unlock.
I hope you all have a great end to your week. I’ll talk to you on Monday.
AK
