How to earn Bitcoin, or streaming sats, from your podcast
Want to earn Bitcoin, automatically, as your listeners enjoy your podcast? How about getting tips or even messages from your audience, all paying you Bitcoin?
There are emerging podcast apps out there - like Fountain, Podcast Guru or Castamatic - that can be configured, by a listener, to send you small amounts of Bitcoin as they listen. It’s free to set yourself up to receive them, too - and by doing it, you’ll reward podcast app developers and the open podcast ecosystem.
Listeners can automatically send you a small amount of Bitcoin every minute they listen. They can give you a “boost” - a tip - if they like what they’re hearing and want to reward you for the value they get from your podcast. Or they can send a “boostagram”, a tip with a message attached, to give you great, positive feedback.
Here’s how to get your podcast earning cryptocurrency. Now: it’s still very early days, but it’s much easier than it’s been before.
Any questions about the below? Come and ask in the PodcastIndex Social group, a system that’ll remind you of Twitter. That’s full of people who can help you.
Before we begin: what will you earn?
With this system, you’ll earn real Bitcoin, not some sort of strange coin or token that you’ve never heard of.
Because one Bitcoin is worth many thousands of dollars - in fact, $69,500 when we last updated this - you’ll use satoshis, normally shortened to “sats”.
Just like a cent is a small fraction of a dollar, so a satoshi is a small fraction of a Bitcoin. A very small fraction - one sat is 100 millionth of a Bitcoin.
You can transfer Bitcoins to your own local currency whenever you want (if you want): your local currency is called fiat money, in case you see that word somewhere. Or you can keep your earnings in Bitcoin, where it may increase in value (or, who knows, may not). But don’t worry - this isn’t a cryptocurrency scam.
1. Go get a Strike account
The Strike app is available in over 95 countries in the world, including every state of the USA except for New York. The link we’ve used here is an affiliate link that will give you (and us) $500 of free trades. Or, just search for Strike in your app store.
Your Strike account is, essentially, a bank account for Bitcoin. You can set it to automatically withdraw Bitcoin into your “normal” bank account when you reach 100,000 sats (that’s about US $70). Or you can leave it there. Again, nobody is asking you to invest in cryptocurrency.
Once you’ve got a Strike account - which may be a bit of a torturous process requiring ID documents thanks to government rules around money laundering but should be free - you’ll be given a “Lightning address”. Mine is jamescridland@strike.me - which people can use to send money to you.
2. Add your payment details in your RSS feed
If you host your podcast with a podcast host, you may be able to ask support nicely to add this data to your feed (or tell you how).
This code lives in the main <channel> part of your RSS feed. Here, we’re giving 1% of everything we earn to the Podcast Index, and keeping the rest.
<podcast:value type="lightning" method="keysend">
<podcast:valueRecipient name="James Cridland" type="lnaddress" address="jamescridland@strike.me" split="99" />
<podcast:valueRecipient name="Podcast Index" type="lnaddress" address="podcastindex@podcastindex.org" split="1"/>
</podcast:value>3. You’re done - and can now receive payments
Listeners enjoying your show on supported apps will now have the ability to: a) give you a small amount of sats for every minute they listen b) give you a larger amount of sats as a “boost”, along with a message.
You will get a notification every time you receive money into your Strike account. You can turn that off if you want.
4. See who paid you and the messages they sent
Strike is just a “bank account”, so all you’ll see is this - a set of wierd things marked “payments::stream” which contain links to metadata about the payment…
That’s not very helpful, is it?
Well, we thought we’d make it easier for you. So we have a thing called “Runway”, which will pull that data from the individual podcast players, and give you something looking like this:
How much can you earn?
In the week ending November 14 2021, Podnews earnt 42,160 sats, which at the time of writing is US $29. That’s the equivalent of $1,508 or so in a year, which might also be the equivalent of a plane ticket and a nice stay in a hotel, or dinner and food for you and all your mates.
Or, you might keep that Bitcoin, and assume it goes up in value. But, again, you don’t have to.
Because Podnews is only a three minute podcast, we don’t get as much automatically-streaming sats as others, either, and are rather more reliant on boosts and boostagrams: one reason why you’ll see us mention boostagrams most Mondays.
