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by Aaron R K
We’ve heard about Play to Earn, getting crypto rewards for gaming, and Move to Earn, getting crypto rewards for physical motion and exercise, but how about Watch to Earn, getting paid in crypto to watch online videos? Is it s a new form of finance? A Ponzi scheme? Or maybe every couch potato’s dream?
I’ll get straight to the point. It looks like very promising technology in its early phases of development. This is because it modernizes aspects of marketing, entertainment and the dissemination of opinions and information.
How often I have heard people in real life, and on internet, complain about ads. I certainly don’t like it when an ad to suddenly interrupts music I’m listening to, or an exciting moment in a movie I’m watching. Many online apps and services are offered free of ads, and even legacy cable TV service offers the technological means for viewers to skip ads, or fast-forward through them, in a manner that causes the ads to lose much of their impact.
However advertising is a vital part of the economy, and this makes it is a important component of a modern, civilized society. As much as people love to hate ads, we need them. They make the economy, with its products and services, move faster.
Web 3 has promising innovations which, if implemented correctly, will improve the efficiency of ads, showing the right ads to the right people at the right time. And this can be done openly, in a less covert manner than what you get with the algorithms of certain large tech companies, I think you know who they are! And if people can get crypto for watching ads, so much the better!
D Tube is a decentralized Video Platform that, while not exactly being a watch-to-earn service, is similar to one. D Tube offers crypto rewards for curating videos. I like the D Tube’s user interface, which reminds me of YouTube. While using the platform, I got a warning from my antivirus program, similar to a warning I got recently, while doing NFT activities, and maybe my antivirus give a threat warning when I’m using decentralized file-storage-and-distribution services, which D Tube uses. I hope to find out more about this topic in the near future. A lot of antivirus programs are focused on Web 2, and decentralized file systems are Web 3.
Permission.io has a Web 3 ads system of rewarding users who watch a The way it works is: 1. You use the internet as you normally do. 2. When they find a relevant ad, they let you know. 3. If you watch the ad, you’ll be compensate with their crypto, called “ASK”. You can install the Permission extension in your browser, search for things on the Net, and based on your searches, a relevant video can be presented to you, which, if you watch it, will be rewarded with ASK crypto. Since the extension seemed to have a lot of permission to do various actions on my computer, I took a cautious approach, and installed it on my worst laptop (which I can use for slightly more risky app, etc.), and on the Chrome browser, which is a less important, secondary browser for me (instead of my main browser, which is Brave). In other words, I only wanted to use it on my least important computer and browser.
I did a search, “new crypto products” on Google. The Permission extension offered me a video to watch in relation to the search (for Wirex, and app for using crypto and fiat currency), and after watching it I earned 5 ASK. The system looked promising. I watched some videos and earned more ASK crypto.
The problem was that the value of the crypto received for watching the videos was so low that it was not worth my time. The current price of ASK on CoinMarketCap.com is only $0.0005792, a fraction of a penny! Even at the coin’s all time high of $0.02496, 5 ASK for watching an ad is a joke! In one of Permission.io’s blog posts, the writer poses the question “What makes a good cryptocurrency earning app?” and the one of the answers given is “Good earning potential”, which is ironic, given what they currently provide as compensation. I’m hoping that this organization will fix this problem quickly, to properly represent Web3’s potential. They can start by AT LEAST providing compensation equal to the minimum wage in America, which is setting the bar very low, but far higher than what the app currently provides. Crypto was meant to liberate people, financially and in other ways, not exploit them.
Technically, the app performed very well, offering me a video to watch, soon after searching on Google. It was also fun to use, and did not disturb my general Web surfing experience. I can see how this, or similar technology, could be a very important component of the modern Web, after they fix the issues with fair financial compensation. Instead of nickel-and-diming, they should set a pay threshold, starting with minimum wage, and hopefully offering more as the business grows. Besides being unfair to the workers, it also fails to be inviting as a marketing tool. As someone who is active in online marketing, I would like to have my products and services shown to the that portion of the public who are more likely to possess the funds required to make purchases. Obviously, person who spends significant time earning a nickel here and a dime there, far below even the minimum wage, seems less likely to purchase a new car or laptop, compared to someone who makes normal wages, or at least a minimum-wage side hustle online. As the app currently stands, it functions well as a demonstration of Web 3 technology, but not of Web 3 economics.
Also, I would like that the permissions given to this extension were fewer, which would make it more comfortable for me to use.
Another watch to blockchain video service worth mentioning in this context is Odysee (https://odysee.com/), which rewards both users and creators with its crypto, LBRY. One of the great things about Odysee.com is that it is a free speech website, providing a rich diversity of viewpoints. As is normal with online media and social media, I find some content on Odysee to be objectionable, but no one is forcing me to watch the content that I don’t like. There are a lot of interesting videos available to see there, and watching them presents an additional opportunity to acquire crypto.
The Brave Browser is an app with built-in Web 3 watch-to-earn features. Brave not only provides crypto payments for viewing ads, the Browser has a built-in crypto wallet.
Web 3 offers the potential to transform media and advertising, empowering the people of Earth economically, and with control of their personal data. Though this technology is still at an early phase of development, it will undoubtedly continue its rapid growth.
There are some good YouTube video tutorials for using Brave including Brave’s reward system for viewing ads. However, the videos that I watched did not mention some important points regarding setting up Brave’ crypto-for-ad-watching feature.
To get Brave Ads, one needs to enable them in the Brave Browser, enabling Brave Ads and Brave Rewards, in the Brave Ads dashboard, and in Brave browser settings (settings, Brave Rewards, and click to turn on Brave Private Ads). According the the Brave Community Forum (https://community.brave.com/), notifications need to be turned on in Windows, including turning them on specifically for the Brave App. I did this action. The whole thing can be done in a few minutes. In the Brave Community forum, which functions as tech support for the Brave Browser, they recommend turning on notifications in the windows system, and turning off “Focus assist”, which is like a “Do not disturb” sign for Windows, that can block notifications (including notifications about ads from Brave).
In the Brave Browser settings, I set the maximum number of possible ads to 10 per hour, but you can set the number of ads to as little as zero ads per hour. This setting is for the maximum number of possible ads, and is not a guarantee that you will receive that many ads to view. It is not even a guarantee that you will receive any ads from Brave to view. This is because the Brave ad system tries to match the ads it offers to its interpretation of the user’s interests.
In Brave’s Community Forum, in FAQ, “Why am I not seeing Brave Ads?”, the following information is provided: “The algorithm that matches users with Ads is designed to find and show relevant Ads”.
If you set up the Brave ad reward system, but are offered few or no ads to view, it’s possible that there may be no ads in Brave’s ad system that match items that Brave believes you would be interested in.
You may want to try the Brave Rewards feature and see how it works for you. This is new advertising technology, and it is possible that Brave’s ad system is in an early phase of development. If Brave offers you few or no ads to view, it’s possible that there are not many ads that seem to match your interest, according to Brave’s algorithm. It’s also possible in the future, as the Web 3 advertising space grows, there will be more and more ads that Brave offers you for viewing.
At the time of writing, there are 36 active campaigns with Brave Ads for USA generally (which was, as far as I could tell, the highest number of campaigns for any country in the world. In addition, there seemed to be a few American states (including California and Colorado) which had ad campaigns, which I assume were in addition to the 36 campaigns for USA generally.
This is the internet address where this information was provided: https://brave.com/transparency
The link to the Brave Community Forum is: https://community.brave.com
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