Podcasts have grown in popularity over the past few years. In addition, revenue for the industry has grown as well.

However, most podcast monetization is through third parties or direct advertising. Subscribers don’t often directly pay the content creators directly.

As a result, Breez, a bitcoin payment solution built on the Lightning Network, built the mechanism that cuts out the middlemen.

This micropayments offering allows podcast listeners to send a determined amount of sats to their podcaster while listening. 

“For example, to pay 3000 sats for an hour-long episode, the user would set the rate to 50 sats/min. Setting the rate to 0 lets the user listen for free,” explains Roy Sheinfeld, the co-founder of Breez in a Medium post. 

“Users can also send one-off tips to the creators by pressing the Boost! button at whatever level they choose. Boosting is like clapping with sats.” 

The native podcast player has this payment system along with standard podcast player functionality. These include speed adjustments, search abilities, and note additions. 

Podcasting 2.0 Aims to Make Podcasting Valuable 

Breez and its player are one part of a wave of change in the podcasting industry. Much like cryptocurrencies want to break away from traditional banking systems, Breez wants to offer a way to escape the constraints and censorship of large podcast platforms. 

Kicked off by the Podcast Index and called “Podcasting 2.0,” there is a move towards providing podcasts with a platform of value and free speech. 

Rather than being held by streaming platforms like Spotify or Google, Podcasting 2.0 aims to provide a free, decentralized index of podcasts.

Alongside this, podcasts are seen as an area ripe for improving Lightning payment adoption. Podcasting offers an already invested audience, one that is largely tech-savvy and interested in avoiding frustrating mid-stream adverts. 

For podcasters, of which there are millions, it offers a way out of censorship or pandering with the payments coming directly to their pocket.