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How Crypto Can Solve Payment Woes for Online Content Creators?
Ricardo Martinez | Feb 05, 2020 | 16:00
Monetizing online content can be a great way to get paid doing what you love. Crypto can help expand the reach of content creators allowing them to get paid directly from people all over the world.
Crypto Can Help People Monetize Their Social Media Content
One of the major reasons for the success of Youtube is that it enabled content creators to share in the platforms advertising revenue, allowing content creators to monetize the videos they create. This ability to get paid from the posts you make on social media set the platform apart from other video streaming sites. Other platforms like Medium have followed suit, allowing bloggers to get paid in a similar way.
For people outside of developed economies, the ability to monetize content is much more limited. This is due to a much less accessible financial system. Many simply can’t accept online payments and don’t even have a home internet connection. Many stay connected via smartphones, rather than computers.
In many developing nations, a majority of the population is unbanked, does not have a debit/credit card, makes most of their daily purchases using cash. Even utility payments like electric, water and telecom services can be paid at kiosks in cash.
This presents an awesome opportunity for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin to fill this void. Another greatly underestimated benefit of using cryptocurrencies is that content creators who have fringe views or unpopular opinions, who have been de-platformed, can also still monetize content.
Content Creators Can Accept Digital Currencies Through Many Existing Platforms
Due to the massive growth in online censorship and financial de-platforming of controversial content creators, many different services and options have been created to help content creators accept Bitcoin and other crypto-assets.
There are options like Bitbacker and Bitpatron, which allow content creators to accept crypto through a trusted third-party platform similar to Patreon. Bitpatron even allows Lightning Network instant donations and micro-donations. Bitbacker offers a variety of different crypto donation options for content creators.
Another, more censorship-resistant way for content creators to accept donations in a way that preserves privacy and completely prevents being de-platformed is to self-host your BTCPay server and LibrePatron instance.
BTCPay Server is a self-hosted payment processing platform, which allows you to accept donations and sell stuff for BTC. It provides a similar payment interface to Bitpay, but processes payments in Bitcoin and Lightning Network micropayments, through your own server, using your own full node.
LibrePatron is a Patreon alternative which integrates as an addon with BTCPay Server, and allows content creators to accept monthly Bitcoin donations, and also Fiat donations through a Cash App integration. Since it’s self-hosted nobody can cut off your finances.
These kinds of powerful tools will only help decentralize the internet, route around censorship, and allow unbanked content creators to monetize a global audience, regardless of access to financial infrastructure.
What do you think about content creators using crypto to monetize? Let us know in the comments!
Image via Shutterstock
