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It all comes down to computers. Communicating the information superhighway can be a confusing mix of on ramps and off ramps. Bitcoin is worthless, artificial. Gold. Is it still rat poison? Probably. Rat poison squared. We need to get into the world of, OK, this is actually foundational technology. What the Internet of Money? Does is it creates a single. Network which can do a microtransaction to a giga transaction. The Internet is going to be one of the major forces for reducing the role of government. The one thing that's missing that that will soon be developed is a reliable E cash. Thank you for joining us for this week's episode of Final Settlement, a podcast from On RAMP Media. On today's show, we speak with Oscar Mary, the founder of Fountain, a podcasting app that seamlessly aligns incentives between creators and listeners through the power of open protocols. We explore the value for value model of content monetization, value driven social graphs and discovery mechanisms, the issues with existing centralized creator platforms and how Bitcoin's utility upends these broken models by empowering both the user and the creator. Oscar was an early mover in the realm of value for value and has a wealth of knowledge on the topic. This episode is part one of the two-part series on the concept of value for value. So stay tuned for the subsequent episode of Final Settlement with Sam Means, the founder of Wavelink and now time for the show we're live. Welcome back to Final Settlement Podcast brought to you by on RAMP Media, where we take a look at Bitcoin from a technological perspective, the protocol layer and the ways in which Bitcoin is impacting society. And really, you know, talking to builders and looking at ways that people are using Bitcoin to introduce new forms of utility in the real world and improve upon incumbent systems. And really excited for today's conversation with Oscar Mary, founder of Fountain. Welcome to the show, Oscar. Thanks Brian. Really excited to be here. Looking forward to this conversation. Joining us from rainy rainy London in the late afternoon. So really appreciate it and excited to talk about you know what you've been working on in building with Fountain and really dive into the thesis around value for value, which I think you've done, you know, a great job of articulating over the years. And we're very early to this idea, this notion of, you know, Bitcoin being this really useful way to transmit value on the Internet and you know, streaming SATS and all of that. So we'll get, we'll get into the details of all that, but maybe it'd be good to sort of just learn a bit more about your background, how you even got into this space and and understanding Bitcoin and and how that led you to founding Fountain. Yeah, sure. Happy to give a kind of brief overview of my background. I've worked in tech pretty much my whole career, done a number of different things. And I guess the back story to Fountain is that it's two areas of interest to me that happened to kind of cross bars. And those two areas being number one, Bitcoin. I've been interested in Bitcoin for many, many years and was quite lucky to stumble across it quite early, but never thought that I would ever, you know, work in Bitcoin or or do anything with it other than just hold it myself as a store of value. But I've always been very interested in it as a technology and as a, you know, economic kind of development. And then the second area is audio. So I had a previous business that was in the audio space as well, actually working with voice technology, short form audio on some of the only Voice Assistant platforms like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. So I've always been passionate about audio as a medium and I've always loved it as a medium because it's unique and it's not competing for our time and attention with all of the other, you know, digital distractions that we have during the day. You know, you can listen to audio when you're commuting to the office or you're doing chores around the house or, you know, just going for a walk. So I've always been a massive fan of spoken word, audio, podcast, audio books and and always been a bitcoiner for many years. And so I guess the back story was that in 2021 I'd sold my previous business and was kind of you know, deciding what to do next and wanted to do some mobile development in the audio space and was playing around with a couple of things, not necessarily planning to start a company or or do anything too seriously. And at the time was experimenting with how can we surface the the the best moments from podcasts in a in a better way. I think one of the amazing things about podcasts as a medium is that you hear these incredible insights from the hosts and the guests that can have a profound effect on your knowledge, the way you see the world, how you think about things, your perspective. But often they're kind of, those moments are lost either in the long list of episodes that you have in your podcast app but you don't necessarily have time to listen to, or just in the back catalogue of of shows that maybe you've only just recently subscribed to or you don't even subscribe to. So I was playing around with that concept and kind of made my way towards podcasting as a space because the best source for this these these insights, these audio clips is actually the podcast medium because there's so much content out there and it's so easy to create a podcast and and the industry is booming. So just when I was kind of exploring all of that at the beginning of 2021, I came across what Adam Curry and Dave Jones were doing with podcasting 2 Point O and the Podcast Index. And for anyone that doesn't know the back story to to that podcasting 2 Point O is is a movement to push open podcasting forward to add new features but also protect open podcasting from becoming centralized or dominated by one big tech platform. We've we've kind of seen Apple and Spotify both try to do that over the past few years. So yeah, Adam and Dave and obviously Adam, he's the pod father. He invented podcasting back in the day, back in whenever it was 20 years ago. So I came across Adam and Dave and what they were doing as I was exploring the podcast space and and playing around with a few things. And then I saw what they'd done with the value block specification, which is basically the the part of the new podcasting specification that allows you to send Bitcoin over the Lightning Network to content creators, but do it in an open way where it's not just happening on one app, one hosting company or one platform. And and when I saw that, it was kind of like I guess a light bulb moment for me, which was, you know, I'd already been convinced on Bitcoin as a store of value. I believed in it as you know a future critical part to the way money works in the world. And seeing that expressed through micro payments specifically in a medium that I cared a lot about and was actively experimenting with. That was when I made the decision to OK take this side project, this little podcast app with clips in it that I was playing around with and and actually you know, launch it on the app stores and and turn it into a business and and that was the the beginning of Fountain in 2021. So yeah, that's the kind of high level overview of of how I ended up here and doing this. At ON RAMP, we believe that Bitcoin will be the most important asset to own in the 21st century. Our multi institution custody solution is the safest and most secure way to ensure that your Bitcoin remains in your in your family's possession for decades to come. Multi institution custody maximizes security and minimizes counterparty risk. Leveraging Bitcoin's native properties to eliminate single points of failure that have historically complicated Bitcoin ownership on RAMP provides Peace of Mind for your Bitcoin journey. For more information, check us out at on rampbitcoin.com. Oscar, can you share something I'm genuinely curious about? Is like just podcasting in general? Like, it's obviously a great medium and without knowing much about less about the genesis, but like what? What has it gotten right so far and what has it gotten wrong, right? Like, we know, you know, Facebook and Twitter are great examples of like this first version of the Internet and it was massive centralization and and it worked for a while until all the natural effects from centralization happen and then it starts to not work. When it comes to censorship and all the natural things, podcasting is less kind of like straightforward from somebody on the outside. I'm sure it's for you. You, you and others that are focused on it see different things that work really nicely and then others that don't, you know, I think of like ads as one of them, right and like how do you actually monetize and attribution, but like anything that you can share the existing like status quo I think would be helpful. Yeah, sure. I think there's a lot there to talk about. I think in terms of what podcasting has got right as an industry over the years, I think the first is that it's open. It's one of the kind of last mediums of media on the Internet that is truly open. If you think of it in comparison to video or short form text which are both highly centralized on the big social media platforms and including YouTube and that podcasting has always remained open. And the phrase wherever you get your podcast has kind of stuck with how people describe the podcast and it's podcasting is not associated with one particular company. And so I think that's probably the biggest thing that's gone right in the industry. And then I would also say you mentioned ads, I think that the format of a podcast, the way the apps work in the the listener is kind of in full control. They'd never have to listen to the ads. Has kind of isolated podcasting in a positive way where the medium has maintained A distraction free experience where you can just go and enjoy the the content without having to sit through ads or without having to, you know, wrestle with your time and attention because there's some other surface on the app you're using that's pulling you in a different direction. So yeah, I'd say those two things are probably, you know, the biggest reasons why people love podcasting so much and why it's continuing to grow. I think 1 area where it has fallen slightly behind is some of the social features that exist within other mediums that they have positive effects and they also have negative effects. And I think whilst we want to be careful that we don't replicate some of the negatives that we see on other social platforms, there are incredible positives around making media consumption social. You know if you respect somebody a lot and they recommend something to you that's that's a high signal thing and and it's a way that you discover great content. You know, I'm sure you guys and I know I have and I'm sure everyone listening has discovered great content, whether it's on Twitter or another social media platform that has been really interesting and valuable to them. Whereas with podcasting still to this day and you know we're trying to change that with found thing, can talk more about that in a bit. But still to this day, the way most people hear about podcasts is just kind of like word of mouth and there's no real scalable kind of discovery mechanism other than what exists on the other social platforms. But there's a whole bunch of problems there in terms of friction, which I can talk about. So yeah, I think the social features is one thing that's held podcasting back slightly and that's a big part of what podcasting 2 Point O is trying to change by introducing some of the the the kind of the infrastructure to allow us to create social features like you'd see on YouTube or like you'd see on Twitter within podcasting. But in a way that it works across the different apps and in an open way where not one company kind of owns all of the data and controls the the algorithms and things like that. Yeah, no, that makes a ton of sense in terms of, you know, creating social graphs, if if you will. Or you know value ranking signals that are are generated not by a centralized entity and you know creating a a for you page that they think you should should watch but instead actually having the users in the audience Dr. That ranking system I think is a super fascinating part about what what you guys are building and really just what Bitcoin and and the ability to stream value enables. But maybe might be worth taking like a step back and just talking about sort of the value for value thesis at a high level and and drilling down into into what that means and and why that's been sort of integral into the rest of the the rest of these capabilities in terms of improving the way that people monetize their content and also listen and you know absorb content. Yeah, 100%. So the the phrase value for value was absolutely coined. And currently again, who who is one of the inventors of podcasting and it's a philosophy whereby content should be freely available. You shouldn't have to pay for the content that you consume. But then you if you choose to, you should give value back to the content creator based on what you think that content is worth. And I'll say right off the top that this is a very new concept. It doesn't really exist on the Internet at that big of a scale right now. I think Patreon is probably the closest example that we have to a value for value platform, although there's a whole bunch of problems with the way that they do it because they push creators to actually put their content behind a paywall. So yeah, value for value is about giving value back to the content creators that you've received value from. And a great way to understand it or think about it is through the analogy of the other things that you spend your money on. So the example I like to use is if you go for a walk and you buy a cup of coffee, maybe that's $5 and you get a certain amount of enjoyment out of that cup of coffee. How much enjoyment do you get from listening to your favorite podcast or a great podcast episode that taught you something about a topic that you care about? Is it the same as that cup of coffee? If it is, then why wouldn't you send value back in the form of a payment to that content creator? It's not the way that we're used to consuming content on the Internet. Normally, it's either you pay and you consume that content after you've paid or you are monetized through ads and essentially you become the product and then that leads to a whole load of downstream negative incentives. So yeah, that's high level what value for value is. I'll also mention that value for value is not just about money. It's also about giving value back in other ways. So again, Adam Curry uses this great phrase called time, talent and treasure. So you can contribute value back with your time by, you know, making a little bit of effort to, to help share that content or add to the content in some way, whether it's through curation or adding additional context. You can contribute your talents through, you know, helping on on a project or or helping out some way and then of course treasure through the the payment system that we have. So yeah, that's a high level overview of value for value. And I guess the the challenge in pushing this philosophy forward is making it easy for people to actually send value back. And if you look at that, I use the example of Patreon. It's incredibly difficult to sign up to Patreon. So you may have heard a podcaster that you listen to say, hey guys, if you really like the show, come and support me on Patreon. The act of doing that has a large amount of friction because you have to leave the app that you're consuming the content in, go to Patreon, sign up to Patreon, figure out what subscription tier you want to pay for, and then make that financial decision on an ongoing basis. Which doesn't make sense for consuming content on the Internet because we consume, especially in the modern day, so much content and so much varied content that the idea of paying a subscription for all of your favorite content creators just doesn't work. It doesn't add up. People are already going through the kind of subscription hell challenge with the the TV streaming platforms and so value for value from a product perspective and this is what we're trying to do with Fountain is making it as easy as possible from the moment that you receive that value and you think wow that was incredibly insightful to actually send a bit of value back. And so the open protocols in RSS, Bitcoin, Lightning and also now Noster as well, that's about making it easier. And then the pay the micro payments that we get with the Bitcoin Lightning network, that's about, that's about reducing the friction in terms of the amounts that you have to send because you don't have to send that much to make it impactful. Even if you send, you know, 100 Sats, 500 Sats, 1000 Sats, you know, across a podcaster's audience that can really add up. And so designing the product and designing the interactions in a way where making the payment feels like there's no friction to it and it doesn't even really feel like a payment, it just feels like a normal social media interaction is is also a big part of reducing that friction. But yeah, high level value for value is just, it's a philosophy and it's about a two way value exchange that's voluntary and it's about. Yeah, rewarding the content creators giving back to them when they provide value to you. And we believe that ultimately that will lead to a better Internet if we can get this right, rather than an ad driven Internet or an Internet that's driven by attention algorithms that essentially try to hook you into the platform through whether it's shock or, you know, anger or outrage or or just just negative discussions. If all media consumption is driven by those algorithms, then we're going to end up in a really bad place. And so, yeah, it's a philosophy, but it's also about changing the way content is surfaced on the Internet. Yeah. I think it's, you know, not to We hear podcasts and it's like a light word in the sense of like media entertainment. But what you just described you can go even high level and think about this as building more prosperous productive world. Because you referenced early in the pod about you find the profound sentiment on a on a on a clip and then you're forced to figure out how to do it. And like anybody that knows me that listens or you know, even Brian, like yeah, I'm forced to like do an iPhone kind of like screen recording and then you're sending it in an iMessage and it's just clunky all around. But the notion of this idea of people from all over the world for the first time have specialized, unique knowledge and rather than tell the person that's at the corner of their street or coffee shop and let them learn from them, they can still do that. But a bunch of other people from all over the world can can learn that. And the one that's most relevant just because of listeners, this pod is like Bitcoin. Because I think about Bitcoin, like, imagine Bitcoin not existing with the Internet and not from, like the telecommunications protocol and transferring Bitcoin, but from the idea of the dissemination of information, like how fast it was able to happen because of podcast and Marty, who's a big proponent and friend, right? Like back in the day, and this is even probably middle period, because back in the day there's probably very much a desert. But like, think about like 17/18/19. There was only so much signal in the Bitcoin space. And you had Marty and Matt week after week talking about, you know, Bitcoin. And when you're out alone, now there's a lot more people, there's more meetups, but when you're not, there's nobody there. You're like listening to this stuff and you're picking up that signal when you would have normally not been able to pick it up. And that allows people to learn. That allows people to go build and then also start to contribute. And that wouldn't exist without podcasts. And then if that filter wasn't there or the way to monetize for those individuals weren't there then maybe they could only do it for X long or maybe Marty would had to figure out how to walk a dog or whatever he you know he's he's known to try to do back in the day. But it's it's just it's a very important function in in what's really compelling about the whole thing is it's so brand new that we don't know like what the right way is. That's why I asked earlier about like, what did they get right and wrong? Because this is the first time it's ever existed to be able to like put these kind of disparate individuals with specialized information together. And then how do they monetize and how do we make them, you know, how do we make it all make sense and how do you find the attribution? Finding is just so like if we're still in the early stages and you can see how its importance is relevant, it's just now how do you figure it out? Yeah, exactly. And I think using Bitcoin as an example of a intellectual topic that people are interested in, they want to learn more about. But there's an incredible amount of subtlety to it that takes time to understand. Podcasting is such a great medium for that and I think that's why so many people will tell you that, you know, they discovered Bitcoin or they went down the Bitcoin rabbit hole through listening to podcasts. And another example that I always think about is, especially back in, you know, 20/17/2018, if you were to go and search for Bitcoin on YouTube, the stuff that you would be presented with would take you in a totally wrong direction. It would take you towards some kind of, you know, trading course or it would take you towards some kind of coin that's been invented out of nowhere. The case on YouTube, right. Like, I don't think that's really improved that much. Yeah. Yeah, it it. Still is the case. And I think the contrast between that and having, you know, long form discussions with hosts that you trust, that bring on guests with different perspectives, you still get to learn different ideas. But the contrast between those two things I think is stark and it really highlights why it's such an important medium. And and Bitcoin is just one, yeah, intellectual topic that is incredibly valuable to learn about. There's others like, you know, health or you know technology and other areas that are so important for you know, the the world developing in a positive way. And I think, yeah, the medium is just is so good for that. But, but again, we need to number one, help content creators that are thinking about things in the right way and not just thinking about, you know, how can they grow their audience short term with the right thumbnail, with the right click bait headline, with the right guest. That's kind of of the moment and you know, it's going to generate some buzz this month, but maybe over the long term we'll deliver less value. We need to help content creators to be able to shift the way they think about content production. And the great thing about value for value is that the incentives are completely aligned because the only thing you're optimizing for as a content creator is the value that you're delivering to your audience, nothing else. And then the second thing, as I said is the discovery, the the way that we allow the signal to actually travel through not just Fountain, but through other apps. And and we're still a long way off that, but making some initial initial roads. Yeah. No, absolutely. I So let's let's talk about Fountain more specifically and and you know creating this sort of two side 2 sided value marketplace. If you could speak to you know how you've gone about designing the app really you know on both sides. So for creators and also for listeners and and those incentives you mentioned just sort of you know for for listeners who may not be familiar with for with Fountain and how it works, it would be helpful to just sort of walk through on both sides how it works for creators and listeners. Yeah, sure. So yeah, just to start off, I guess I'll just say that Fountain is a podcast app like all of the other podcast apps. If you are coming from Spotify or Apple or Overcast or Pocket Casts, the app should feel very familiar. We've worked incredibly hard on on just getting that core listening experience really good because obviously it is the primary thing it Fountain is a tool and the primary thing that it does is enable you to listen to podcasts. For me personally as well, I used to listen on Overcast, so I was a big fan of Overcast. And so a lot of the kind of design is influenced from that and I guess that was the primary focus for us in in the first kind of year or so is just building the best podcast listening experience we we could because ultimately app on Spotify are great apps. You know, they've got great UX, they've got great design, they've got massive teams. And so if you're asking someone to switch from an existing product that works well, you need to deliver on the basics. And so despite the fact that I'm incredibly excited about, you know, Bitcoin, Lightning, micro payments, some of this discovery stuff that I'll talk more about, really we wanted to just focus on getting the listening experience as good as we we could and I think we're in a really good place there. So yeah, it's a normal podcast app. And then the the key differentiator from a listener's perspective is there's two things. The 1st is you can support your favorite creators, your favorite podcasters and also now musicians. As we've added music, you can do that directly from the player as you're listening. You can either send a one off payment with a message which is called a boost or you can stream stats for every minute that you listen. And interestingly, the streaming stats is is quite a high proportion of the payment volume that we see to creators. And so it's a very interesting kind of passive contribution mechanism that doesn't involve a subscription, doesn't involve a pay, a payable. The second differentiator for the listener is the social features that we have. So we have a social graph in Fountain, you can follow people. So if you were to follow me and I'll send a payment to an episode saying this was a great episode, I learnt a lot on this. You would see that in your feed on Fountain, and that's how we use the payments as a signal to drive Discovery in terms of what's worth listening to. We also have charts that are based on the value rank as well. So yeah, Fountain, from a listener's perspective, is just like any other podcast app, but you can pay your favorite podcast and you can follow people to this to see what they're finding valuable in terms of great episodes. We also have some other features like clips and playlists and stuff, but I won't go into that in too much detail. And then on the content creator side, again everything we're doing is built upon open RSS. So the features that exist within Fountain, they exist not just within Fountain. There's other podcasting 2 point O apps that do the same thing. There's podcast hosting companies that offer, you know, creators the ability to get set up. But obviously when we started, there wasn't much of this going on, so we did actually decide to build tools for content creators as well. So we do actually offer podcasters a wallet where they can get set up to receive Bitcoin, to receive Sats over the Lightning Network, and also give them features like analytics to see how much they're earning, which episodes are bringing in the most income. Again that's a great signal for them to to help them understand which content is my audience resonating with the most as opposed to the traditional metrics like downloads or even on you know Twitter or YouTube likes anything like that. That the payment metric is, is a much stronger one than the than the like metric. Because you know, if if all three of us on this call were to like a tweet on Twitter or like a YouTube video, that's just, that's a single data point and our like signal is worth the same. Whereas one of us may have found that content profound or really you know, it really resonated with us. It changed the way we see the world in some way. And so with a dynamic payment signal, you can express that value and you can, you know, propagate that signal, whether it's back to the content creator or more broadly for whatever platform is capturing that signal to surface content to other users. You can do that now that you have the dynamic value signal. So yeah, we we, we help podcasters, we onboard them, we give them a Lightning wallet. And yeah, we've had a number of podcasters be pretty successful with that. So yeah, that's high level how it works, both from the listener side and the creator side. And I do think, you know, long term we, we want to be focused more on the listener side. We want to help podcasters where possible. But the great thing we're starting to see is more of the hosting companies are are providing the tools to, you know, connect to wallet, get set up directly as you're actually publishing the podcast. Yeah the the notion or idea of app first or podcast app is so important in the sense of like. I still don't think there's a perfect in the regular world podcast app like you have. You mentioned Apple and Spotify dominate and you you you said overcast. I've used Castbox for a very long time and and gives these ideas of like favoriting to go back to just like books or folders or playlists. Like all these things are still not like baked in and and even Castbox recently kind of like crapped the bed and they like did something weird. So I like I've been looking for a new one you can like export, I forgot what the file is called, but you can export the playlist and I think Fountain does this now where you can absorb it and then kind of like have your your playlist there. But I think that's just like core, right, Because that's what's the table stakes to start with is how do you actually like manage all of like the content and then adding these other layers. How much have you seen is like a dance between you guys providing like on the Fountain side, content creators with some of the ways to how do they think about monetizing or kind of crafting the art, the pod to map to value for value versus some of the creators saying, hey, have you guys imported this or have you guys thought about it Like a good example and I don't even know if it exists yet, is like a Patreon model but based on like an actual podcast. So like you have a pod like this and we go and we end and then we say if you want to listen to the last 45 minutes on the specific pod, here's this kind of like invoice and you can pay that. Has that come up like in like these ideas? Because it feels like that's like the natural middle ground between having to pay for a subscription on this other site versus just like hitting that ZAP to be able to listen to the remainder of the pod. Yeah, that's such a good question. And it's something that we've thought a lot about, and it's something that podcasters have asked us about as well, because it's so equivalent to maybe what they're already doing on Patreon for. For me personally, I think that putting your content behind the paywall as a creator is the wrong strategic thing to do. And there's a few reasons why. The first reason is that you know the the best content that you ever produce might be in the 10 minutes that you put behind the paywall. And then that content is not going to reach as many people as it otherwise would have if you put it out for free. And so, you know, one thing I know for sure is content creators, the number one thing that they care about is growing their audience because it's the most obvious metric to them. Obviously, you know, eventually we want to replace that with a value metric, but right now that's what they care about. And if you have your content behind a paywall, you're inherently limiting your reach. And I think the the best example of this is Joe Rogan. So when Joe Rogan went exclusive on Spotify, his reach and his influence massively declined. He used to be without a doubt the biggest podcaster in the world with the the biggest influence, the biggest ability to bring on high profile guests. And when he went exclusive because he all of a sudden limited his audience to, you know, 30% of all podcast listeners, which is what Spotify's market share roughly is that that reach, that influence, that ability to bring on important guests declined. And I think that you've seen other podcasters like the Lex Friedman's that Andrew Huberman's kind of step into the role that Joe Rogan traditionally kind of. I think you can see this as well in the fact that in his latest deal, the exclusivity course has been removed and I think he's recognized it. I think Spotify have also recognized it that you know that this wasn't really working. So for that reason personally for me any feature that is tied to putting content behind the payroll is not something that we want to encourage and and also those tools already exist. You know you can use Patreon to do that, you can use some of the other ones. I forget the names. For me, I think it's it's much more powerful for creators to have that content be free and open and accessible to anyone and then have a mechanism whereby the audience that do discover it and can send value back are able to do that and are able to do that in a way that there's no friction. Those are really, really good points. One question I have going back to sort of what we were talking about around discovery and social graphs and the ability for this new model to really like break those algorithmic dynamics of existing creator platforms. Could you drill down into like what that what the implications of that are? And and you know, highlight the issues with existing platforms in terms of dampening or or you know, impacting a creator's actual ability to create what they want in the sense that if they're just thinking about feeding the algorithm that actually would influence the, the content they put out and why this model actually improves upon that and allows people to actually just create valuable content. Yeah, I think there's a couple of quite striking examples that we see on YouTube. I think we've all had this experience where we go on YouTube and we find a video that we think is exactly what we want to watch and learn about. But that video ends up being double the time that it should be. It's filled with kind of like pre explainers and fluff or you know segments that don't need to be there. And the reason for that is because YouTube creators get paid based on watch time. If you create longer videos then you're going to get paid more by the the YouTube algorithm. So there's just a natural incentive there to create videos that are longer than they need to be. There's another one which is creating videos regularly. Now this doesn't apply to every YouTube video, every content format, but it does apply to a lot of formats whereby the algorithm rewards you for having regular content. So the more you have a regular pacing to your content, the more likely it's going to be surfaced in the algorithm to new audience. So whether it's. An incentive to create longer content or an incentive to create more content on A at a higher frequency. The the ad driven model where the relationship between view time or watch time. Essentially how much attention are are people paying towards the content and the amount the creator earns. That's the thing that I think is, you know, not a good thing for the content on the Internet because I mean, YouTube is the place that humans go to learn things today. You know, there's nowhere else that we really go. We type stuff into Google and we type stuff into YouTube and we watch the one of the videos that's presented to us. And so if you think about it, it's actually such a drain on everybody's productivity and ultimate, you know, advancement in terms of how much knowledge they have, how much wisdom they have when they have to kind of either sift through the four or five click baity headline videos that are presented to them when they make that search or have to sift through a video that's twice as long as it needs to be. Or maybe there's a real, really subtle version of this where there's a content creator that actually does provide a lot of value to you week in, week out. But because of those subtle incentives around content duration or frequency, you're just kind of like putting a little bit too much time into it than you otherwise maybe would have had to. And maybe the content creator doesn't actually want to be doing that, that they're just incentivize too. And I think, yeah, for me, YouTube's the biggest example where we see this every day. But I also think it exists on on Twitter or or XI think we'll always call it Twitter maybe is Yeah, you see it there too with, you know, people being driven to create long form tweets now that they've launched that feature because that's, you know, driven up in the algorithm more or creating threads rather than a single tweet because threads do well. And so, you know, the social media gurus I guess are advising content creators to do that. And so, yeah, my view is that these negative incentives with media on the Internet, they exist on every single platform. And it's fundamentally driven by the fact that the creators and the platforms monetize through your attention through advertising. And so that I think if we can change that, it's just going to be massively beneficial to the world and the way we learn information online. So I'm really excited about that and and obviously that's why we're doing what we're doing. But it is still super early with this stuff and I think you know being in the the kind of Bitcoin bubble it's, it's very easy. We have a lot of people very excited about what we're doing. We have a lot of users within the Bitcoin community that you know love Fountain and find it really easy to use because they are educated on Bitcoin. They know how it works, they know what the Lightning network is. But the reality is that for the average person out there on the street, you know Bitcoin and Lightning is still incredibly complex and you know off putting difficult to use, difficult to onboard to. So there's a long, long way to go to to change these things, and I think the onboarding to Bitcoin is actually the biggest challenge here. But what's great to see is obviously there's so many different companies working to make this easier. Whether you're a seasoned bitcoiner or brand new to the asset Class, On RAMP provides a best in class private client experience. To ensure that your Bitcoin remains accessible, secure, and in your control, you'll have a dedicated advisor to guide you every step of the way. If you want to meet in person, we now have on RAMP branches in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Nashville, Dallas, Austin, Houston, Los Angeles and Denver with more on the way. Check out on rampbitcoin.com/branches to learn more and get connected with our team. One thing that's super fascinating that you just references. I don't personally think and I haven't thought deeply about this, so I may be putting my foot in my mouth, but like that we get away completely from ads and but I think we get better ads. And what's always been interesting from an external perspective is if you can provide more signal and attribution, whether it's via pod listens or what you're referencing. If there's the natural mechanism to surface the right content, whether it's Twitter or X and and Noster or whatever, it is like to be able to naturally because it's in your best interest to and it's less best interest is altruistic. Provide some kind of value to showcase that there was value delivered. And then you can actually show proof of work with a finite currency to an advertiser or anybody that's looking to get their brand in front of this unique audience that this had this amount of again finite value, not like something you can gain. It helps reinforce this I the the the old adage of 50% of marketing goes in the dump, you know trash. We just, you know, I didn't know what 50% it was and now you can actually start to have a better Internet with the right capital spent. That's not wasteful And then nobody wants you know so he has this like natural feedback loop that builds a better Internet that it's always been compelling to me with value for value. I don't know if if you see a world like that or if you've thought about that from a because I think pods are the great example of like nobody really knows the numbers, right? Like it's my understanding like we have like ideas but there's it's only like directional, it's not actually like specific. Yeah, you're you're definitely right there. I mean the the the podcast advertising industry is built on download numbers, which are, you know, famous for their inaccuracy because of things like the way automatic downloads work on apps. So if you're advertising on the podcast, you know some number of the downloads are not actually people listening and and obviously then people skip the ads as well. And podcast advertisers know this and they'll factor that into, you know, the CPMS. But it's interesting what you said, because I I do believe that's correct in that, well, #1, if you can identify which content is truly valuable for a given topic or interest area or audience group, then you'll by default be willing to pay more for that as an advertiser. So by kind of flaring out the noise of content on a particular topic, you'd be willing to pay more, whether it's ACPM or some other metric to advertise against that content. And I think that's something that's really interesting. I don't believe that advertising is going to go away and I don't have anything against it. I just think that the it's more the attention driven advertising whereby the the ad spend is proportional to the attention that's paid to a particular piece of content. That's the issue not not actually the the selling of the advertising against content. So I think that will always exist. I think value for value gives a great alternative to content creators as well. So you know you don't need to rely on advertising as much. You know we've had some great examples over the past year or so of really successful podcasters that have embraced value for value and recently the podcast ad market had a bit of a downturn. I think it was linked to, you know the the general economic state with with higher interest rates and less money available. But there was a big downturn in the podcast advertising industry and for a lot of podcasters that are having success on Fountain, when some of their advertisers, you know, pulled out or the CPMS dropped, it was really great for them to have value, for value and direct payments as to kind of things out. So yeah, I don't think advertising is going to go away. I think hopefully if we can clear out some of the noise of this content and and really start assigning a more pure value metric to to certain pieces of content, then we can hopefully raise the CPMS. Yeah, that's the way I think about it. I think you worked through the last part that I I wasn't able to articulate was itself propelling or like the flywheel begins. Because if the like you reference the YouTube idea and the incentive model isn't to produce the best content, but that's the goal, right? Is ever is like produce the best content. So if you produce the best content that means you get the most zaps or the most value. And if you produce if you get the most value, then the advertiser naturally wants to put its ad there. But the way you consistently get better value or more value is producing that high level. So you have to showcase like signal in your advertising. It cannot be like garbage, right, Because then you just like basically go the opposite way. So it's the right, like incentives all the way down. And this doesn't even have to be podcasting. This can be almost anything, right? If you can attribute value that somebody's giving and then you can recognize that the value was given, that by definition means that somebody liked it or found it valuable. You can produce the con, the advertisement there. And then that person, if they want to continue that has to be very heavy. They can't basically put some crazy paw or like advertisement about something insane because they would go the opposite way and they would be basically doing what Joe Rogan did on a different scale. But that's an it's an interesting like mental model to work through on like the incentives in the Internet has basically been the opposite in that like it's incentivized the wrong like content creation in certain respects to monetize via clicks and and eyeballs Anyways, just just working through and like how that actually, you know, infusing finite scarcity or value can really fix a lot of things. Yeah, it it improves the incentives for sure. One one question I had for you Oscar is you know this is something I've I think for us like being in the the Bitcoin bubble as you reference like this makes a ton of sense, right? We're improving the incentive model of of content creation and content monetization using this finite scarce asset. And I think you know when I've talked to my normie friends and and other folks about this it is it is still such a very you know novel concept and not something they're familiar with like I'm going to pay per minute or you know pay with a comment like it's it's it's very the response I've gotten is well I get I get my content for free which like we know isn't actually true but that's how they think about it in their mind and their and then their response is well why would I pay X amount of Sats for you know this this content creator. So how do we, how do we, in your mind like, cross that chasm of getting the average person who's not a bit cleaner, who doesn't see the vision of this model, to recognize that this is just a better format for ingesting content? Yeah, that is the that is the number one question. That's what we need to answer. I think there's three categories where we need to drastically improve from where we are today. The 1st is what I mentioned around on boarding to Bitcoin. Where we need to get to is a random person downloads an app like Fountain. They've never purchased Bitcoin before. They don't own any Bitcoin. They don't know what Bitcoin is. They need to be able to either buy Bitcoin or send a payment that interacts with the Bitcoin rails without any KYC and without any friction. It needs to be the same level of friction as something like Apple Pay. Now that is a is a real challenge especially with you know the regulatory requirements, custody and and things like that and also on the other side the kind of current state and complexity of the non custodial options. But that is absolutely critical. I do think we'll get there. It it's kind of in a sense out of our hands as fountain because we don't you know we we use Zebedee to power all of our payments infrastructure. They're great, but obviously they're they're the ones that have the the licenses to do these things. I think we will get there. There's other companies whether it's strike or cash app or or some of the other companies as well that are kind of pushing this forward. But that is an absolutely critical piece. It's enabling that seamless onboarding to Bitcoin and onboarding to the product. Like one of the things we see is the retention of In Fountain for people that send the payment to a podcasters is is incredible. It's it's really, really high. It's like one of the highest that that you'll see out there in mobile apps. And so all we need to do is enable people to get over that first hurdle of sending the first payment. That's the first category. The 2nd is around what you touched on in terms of people's existing expectations for how they consume content and how they interact with content. And I think you're right, people don't think about consuming content for free and then paying afterwards. That doesn't exist anywhere else. It's a brand new concept. It's value for value. What's that? You know, we need to do a much better job of explaining that. And I actually think the way to explain that is not through language or words, It's actually by showing people how other people are doing it. We've started to do this in Fountain, and some of the features we have around this are are working quite well. But essentially it's social proof. It's showing you that. OK, somebody I already follow or somebody I already know has actually sent a large payment to this show or this episode or this artist or this song surfacing that right in the app. And. Or it could be someone that you don't follow, someone that you don't know. And you see, OK, wow, the episode that I listened to last week that I found really interesting. Wow, Someone just sent 100,000 sets to that episode. And yeah, actually it was worth something. It was interesting. Maybe I'll think about doing that. We, we started working on some of these features, but I think there's so much more that we can do in terms of making it feel normal to send money back to content creators. And again, I think one of the beauties of working with Bitcoin and Lightning is that it's not just Fountain doing this. You know, we've got all of the developments happening on Noster as well. There's great experimentation going on there as well because they've got the exact same problem, which is how do you normalize sending micro payments, How do you normalize the, the jump between consuming content, recognizing the value and then making a quick payment even if it's a very small amount and then showing the social proof to to kind of reinforce that cycle. That's, yeah, that's the second category which is on the product side and it's something that we're continually trying to push forward. And then the third category is around the educating content creators and working with them to develop the ask. So one of the big things with value for value is that if you don't ask as a content creator, people aren't going to send you value. Maybe they'll send you a bit, but really to get the thing going, you need to ask people to send you value back. And a lot of content creators don't like doing that. They, you know, they either feel some kind of sense hesitancy to ask their audience for money, or some content creators feel like they're already monetizing their audience because of the advertising system that they think to themselves. Well, my audience already listened to ads, so why would I ask them to send me money on top of that? Because I'm already essentially monetizing them. That's something that's more subtle and it it's less about the product. But I think it it's just as important. And I think yeah, educating content creators about how to frame that ask and and talking to them about the some of the incentive stuff that we've covered is important as well. But also, ultimately, we just need more case studies of it working really well so we can point them, say, hey, don't don't listen to me as as the developer of Fountain. Like, go and check out this content creator who's similar to you, who's having a lot of success. They framed the ask in a really great way that doesn't interfere with their show format or doesn't feel strange, doesn't feel pressured, but they are actually having success. So yeah, those 3 categories of onboarding to Bitcoin, normalizing making payments through social features and then educating content creators on how to actually make that ask. They're, I think, the three pieces that we need to get right if we're going to make this go mainstream. But as I said, I'm optimistic because, well, we're all optimistic about Bitcoins, you know, future development. And I think we can see where that's going. And on the product side, it's not just fountain, it's not just podcasting. I believe this will happen in every media medium on the Internet. It's just a matter of time when we can all learn from each other in terms of experimentation. Yeah, I think the E Cash evolution is going to be an interesting dynamic to watch on the value for value around content creation. But also just like in social apps in general around rewards because it takes a lot of that friction of like opening channels and all the things associated that you reference needing to do a strike or buy versus you can actually it was really cool to do a transaction from Rivers Lightning node to mutiny and I sent like exactly 1 Sat or but via E Cash, right. So I think it's just a very fascinating thing to that people will get to play with and that it's interoperable, obviously. Yeah, that's maybe. Yeah, that's a great. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, no, I was just going to say that's a great example of you know with the E cash you get offline receive as well, whereas right now that's one issue with non custodial lightning is you don't get offline received. So for podcasters, that's another barrier for them, kind of, you know, running their own, having a non custodial setup. And like that that idea of like somebody onboarding and getting some Sats to play with or E cash to play with to start hosting versus having to set up a channel and all the things associated or however would be done in the wallet and also from the like, yeah, it's obviously not a good landscape to be you know running custodial lightning wallets as well so. I'm curious, you mentioned Noster a few times. What's like you know looking ahead to you know quote UN quote the road map for for Fountain and you know what you have on the plans for the Horizon are are there different ways you can integrate into Noster and and you know leverage some of the discoverability features there what else what else are you thinking on on building out whether it's you know, you mentioned music is there plans for you know audiobooks like what else is in your mind of like how this how this can grow and become even larger than it is. Yeah. So Noster is a big part of our plans because it's just a perfect fit for not just Fountain, but also for podcasting in general. You know, when we first launched the social features in Fountain, Nosta didn't exist. And so we had to build our own social graph into Fountain, which was an incredible amount of work and also adds an incredible amount of friction to the onboarding because you need to build up that follower graph from scratch. When you first download the app and sign in, you don't have any followers and we can do things like connect your Twitter and stuff, but obviously that costs a lot of money from the Twitter API. So Nosta is amazing and we're actually in the process of switching out the social graph from the one that exists today in Fountain to to Nosta so that when you download the app, you can just, you know, log in with NOSTA and all of your followers will be there. The other thing that's really, really cool about NOSTA is the interoperability between the social activity as we present it in Fountain and the that same activity surfaced in the main NOSTA client feeds. Like, whether it's Prime or Damas or Amethyst, this this is brand new. This doesn't exist on the Internet today, which is, you know, when I watch a YouTube video, the comments underneath the YouTube video are just from random people that I don't follow. And that's because YouTube has no view into my Twitter social graph or any of the other social graphs that I actively participate in. With Noster, you'll be able to create experiences where you could go to that YouTube video and you could just press a button and it would filter out all of the comments from people that you're not following on Noster. And so you'd be able to just see like, OK, what are my followers, you know, thinking about this YouTube video? And also the comments on that piece of content don't even have to originate on the piece of content. Like if you shared, whether it's a podcast link or a YouTube video link on Twitter, that can be pulled back in and surfaced underneath the content as a comment. So there's interoperability, interoperability in a way that doesn't really exist on the Internet right now, which I'm personally really, really excited about. The the another way you can think about this is you know if you go to someone's profile on Noster, you'll see their feed in reverse chronological order and you can scroll back through their recent activity. But what if you could just go to their profile and filter on, you know, YouTube videos or filter on podcast episodes and just figure out, OK, in the last year, which podcast episodes has this person shared on social media? And that's something that we can just pull directly into Fountain and with your existing follower graph and just surface that in various different ways within the app. So that capability of an open social graph and also the ability to design formats and extend the specification to do these cool interoperable product features is why I'm so excited about Nordston and why we're integrating it. That should hopefully be live in the next month or so. So yeah, we're really excited about Monster. And then I also think just for podcasting as an industry as well, it's a great fit because again, podcasting doesn't have any of the social features that platforms like YouTube or Twitter have. It's highly fragmented. No one app has more than a 30% market share. So this concept of cross app comments, the ability for podcast comments to travel between apps and travel between hosting companies, Noster's the perfect protocol to do that. And so I'm hoping that what we're building on top of Noster into Fountain, we can actually push out into the wider podcasting industry and kind of get Noster adopted as the social layer for podcasting. So yeah, really, really excited about that. And yeah, a bit frustrated that we didn't have it when we launched because we're having to kind of like migrate our social graph, which is a bit of a pain, but we're getting there slowly. The the the other one that's super fascinating I heard and it's kind of merging a couple ideas is I heard you speak on another pod about the idea of like live streaming the pod but like being able to like because there's this thing happening right now where I think most are used to the format of one-on-one or maybe two on one. And so you see like All In has been very popular with four guests. The the last trade has three with a 4th guest, Max and DK, who've both been on this pod. They've started something called walking and taught like podcasting. Like there's these ideas of playing with the medium and this idea of like recording the pod and letting people participate in the app if they're there because that's the native experience. So if it's live. But as you were saying, you know filtering, I was thinking like well what if it was only a subset of your listeners that could participate while you're recording? So it's not live to everybody, it's only live to your your highest or you can select the highest signal. So let's say maybe it was like, you know they're the highest signal. But like let's say there was 5 to 10 people, MVK, Marty, a couple people that could naturally comment if they wanted to listen in real time and interact in this episode. So it would surface in their comment versus having a bunch of people that would naturally fall on a YouTube channel that you have to sift through. That starts to make a more dynamic conversation and interesting like experience because you're letting listeners leave and they have a you. You just are able to filter and curate the dynamic of external people coming in versus it being just open to anybody. Seems kind of fascinating. Yeah, exactly. I think there's so much that's possible, those lines and I think you know again we're we're trying to get the the simple stuff done first, but hopefully down the line we can do a lot more like that. And obviously everything is just you know open. So once you have the data on NOSTA or it's kind of the same as RSS in that the podcast datas or that you can do anything you want with that as a developer. So yeah, I'm sure there'll be a lot more like that coming down the line. Also, well, this has been a fascinating conversation. I'm glad we could sort of walk through the the intricacies and and the details around value for value model and what you guys are building. It found because I think this is this is really you know a concept an idea that's you know we've talked about a lot over the past six to nine months around the goal of this podcast even to to really bring to light these other forms of utility of Bitcoin and outside of you know just digital gold story value like this. This technology is enabling things that you know as we've talked throughout this episode about like are just not possible in the incumbent in the incumbent world in the incumbent system. So super fascinating discussion Oscar, I want to thank you again for for coming on and and talking through these ideas. Where can people learn more about Fountain and start using it? Start sending boosts? Yeah, well thanks so much for for having me on guys. Really enjoyed the conversation. And yeah, if anyone wants to find out more about Fountain, you can go to fountain dot FM. The app's available on MSN Android. You can import your podcast really easily from Apple and Spotify. So yeah, give the app a try and if you have any feedback, feel free to DM me on either Nosta or Twitter. I'm happy to, you know, build what you want to make it the best experience possible. Awesome. Awesome. Thanks, Oscar. Yeah. Thanks for coming on and we'll hopefully have you on again soon. Maybe when the after the Noster integration rolls out, we can talk through how that how that's progressing because that that last part you were talking through was was fascinating to me. I think more and more people are are realizing like yeah let's integrate whatever we're doing with NOSTER. These are all open protocols. They're all interoperable. Like it's it's really fascinating to see. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the show. If you found the information valuable, please share the episode with a friend or leave a rating on your favorite podcast app. All the links we discussed in today's show will be in the show notes inside your podcast app. Before we finish, a quick reminder that On RAMP Media is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and nothing should be construed as investment or legal advice. Regardless of where you are on your Bitcoin journey, we'd love to hear from you. Visit onrampbitcoin.com/contact. Schedule a consultation with one of our private client advisors.
Transcript source: fountain