If YouTube Had Cryptocurrency

Welcome to the Cosmic Crypto Explorer.

Cryptocurrency is an interesting thing. Some people use it as an investment. Some people just use it as another form of money.

YouTube is also an interesting thing. There’s often some sort of controversy surrounding it, but it’s the most popular video platform on the Internet.

What if the two worlds came together?

What if YouTube created its own cryptocurrency that was truly open source. How would that work?

Right now viewers have no incentive to watch ads on YouTube videos, other than to help out their favorite channels. In fact, YouTube even sells premium services which allow viewers to skip the ads. Instead, YouTube could offer a small but reasonable amount of cryptocurrency for watching ads, which would mean more revenue for everyone. Let’s call this cryptocurrency TubeCoins.

These coins could be tradeable on various exchanges like any other regular cryptocurrency, and they could also be spent on YouTube to enable some extra features, like perhaps a YouTube premium subscription, or the ability to unlock a particular episode or series of a YouTube premium show. I think for me being able to use TubeCoin to unlock a particular show for less than the price of a full subscription would be the most interesting option.

They could also be given as tips to YouTube channels. This would make it far easier for people to support channels they like. Instead of having to connect a payment system to YouTube and send money to a channel, they could just earn some crypto from watching ads and then send that, with it all cleanly integrated into the platform.

There could even be a system in place similar to other crypto social platforms where content creators earned some crypto for the likes they receive, though a system like that would have to be done very carefully to avoid people creating multiple accounts just to like one of their own videos.

What do you think about an idea like this? Do you have any thoughts about how such a thing could be implemented? I’d be interested to hear what you have to say in the comments.