Back in April, PornHub made the headlines when it started accepting Verge (XVG) as payment for its online services. The partnership was a mixed bag at best for Verge, but it seems this was just the beginning of crypto’s evolving relationship with the $15 billion online porn industry. This week, PornHub subsidiary Tube8 announced a partnership with a twist. The streaming site plans to tokenize its online offering, and to pay its users to consume pornography with the little known Vice Industry Token (VIT).
With over 150 million page visits per month, Tube8 is a major player in the pornography streaming marketplace, though significantly smaller than rivals such as YouPorn (360 million visits) and RedTube (510 milion). It is hoped that the full tokenization of its content can drive further adoption, grow the site’s user base and encourage a greater degree of engagement from existing users.
VIT markets itself as the only crypto which is created for the specific purpose of tokenizing streaming web content and rewarding viewers for their interaction and engagement. But the tokenization of such an established streaming service is no mean feat, and as is so often the case in crypto, there are scaling issues to accommodate such a large library of online content. VIT currently uses the Ethereum blockchain which critics may say will struggle to take the pace, and plans to migrate to the Steem-derived Graphene blockchain have not materialised as yet.
Robin Turner, a spokesman from Tube8, commented that users being paid to watch porn has been a “pipedream” but one which was “never fully realized.” Now users can earn while they surf, and “the more they interact,” Turner explains, “the more money they earn.” The trailblazing site describes the new partnership as a “paradigm shift.”
It’s clear that there are still barriers to overcome in this ambitious partnership, but the potential rewards for a successful tokenization of such a site’s content are huge. If successful, similar partnerships could be rolled out across a wide range of other applications, and this key part of the crypto ecosystem could move well and truly into the mainstream.
