Listen to a podcast → earn Bitcoin
Yuh.
It's a real thing.
The Fountain App pays you Bitcoin to listen to podcasts.
...sounds a little too good to be true though, right?
This is a long one, so here's the TL;DR:
Imagine if the free, ad-supported version of Spotify only featured podcasts, and they paid you ~1% of the ad revenue you brought in as an incentive to use the app - that's pretty much what Fountain is.
Ok, now here's the deep dive...
We ran our bullsh*t detectors over Fountain's website, and this is what we found:
It's free to sign up and use
You only get paid for the first hour of listening (per day)
The amount you get paid per hour of listening changes every day
You can earn more by listening only to ads (sounds weird, but ok)
You can 'clip' your favorite parts of a podcast, add it to the news feed and get paid every time someone likes it
And the same goes for each time someone likes a comment you've left (basically, likes = payments)
...ok, but that doesn't answer the question.
How does Fountain make money, while paying its listeners?
Because the payout amount changes each day, Fountain can manage its spend - with earnings varying from 1 satoshi per minute, to hundreds of satoshis per minute.
Think of satoshis (SATS) as 'Bitcoin cents.'
1 SAT = 0.00000001 BTC, or $0.0002277 USD.
100 SATS = 0.00000100 BTC, or $0.02277.
Let's say the maximum Fountain will pay each user out in a single day is 100 SATS per minute. That means they'll payout a total of $1.36 USD in BTC to that user for the day.
This isn't how they make money, but how they attract new users - it can be looked at as a marketing budget. The idea being:
If they become known as 'the platform that pays you to listen' → users will naturally gravitate towards it.
Meanwhile, we're going to guess that the function that allows you to:
'Get paid by podcasters and advertisers for listening to their promoted content'
Will be facilitated by Fountain's built-in ad network.
Meaning Fountain gets a cut of every paid ad on the platform (the same way YouTube does).
Let's run the math on that...
According to Google: a good 'cost per 1,000 listeners' is $25-30, for a 60-second ad in a podcast.
That's $0.025-0.030 spent to reach each listener.
Let's assume everything falls on the low end: the advertiser pays $0.025 per listen, and listeners earn 1 SAT ($0.0002277) for that 60 secs.
After the listener is paid, $0.0247723 is left behind to be split between the podcaster and Fountain.
If the splits are like YouTube, 55% will go to the podcaster and 45% will go to Fountain.
A podcast with 1M views would earn $25k.
That means $227.7 would go to listeners, $13,624.76 would go to the podcaster, and $11,147.53 would go to Fountain.
And it's not Fountain fronting that money, but the advertiser.
On top of that, the function that pays editors/authors every time you 'like' a clip or comment they made? That comes out of your pocket, not Fountains.
...so is this all bs?
No, not really.
It's a podcast app that pays you to listen vs. all the other ones that either pay you nothing, or charge you to use them.
Objectively, it's a step up (however small the payout).
And yeah, we're assuming a lot with our math and split percentages! But if we're anywhere close to being right:
We'd like to see the payout percentages be a little more friendly to both listeners and podcast creators alike.
...either way, it's a start!
