Digital currencies and wallets have started to make their presence felt in every sphere of the market. No matter how ignorant you’re about digital currencies, it’s impossible that you wouldn’t have heard about crypto. Digital currencies have risen in popularity over the recent years, and their value has been on a constant rise.
Crypto is short for cryptocurrency and is designed as a medium of digital or virtual currency to be exchanged as transactions. It is secured by cryptography which makes it almost impossible to counterfeit or replicate. Crypto works on a decentralized system which means it’s not reliant on governments or banks to create, regulate, or transact. Due to its ease of handling and management, crypto is becoming a preferred choice of transactions on content platforms too.
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Why do creators prefer Crypto payments over fiat money?
It has been well known that content platforms like OnlyFans take a percentage as commission from the earnings of creators on their platform. In some cases, the commission reaches up to 35% of the earnings, which is pretty high and leaves the creators feeling stripped of their hard-earned money.
Creators on such platforms also face the high processing fees the bank or payment gateways charge for their transactions, and they feel like they are losing more money to different fees than they’re earning. Crypto helps in solving all these problems a creator faces on such content platforms.
Switching to crypto payments on a decentralized platform will give more freedom to the content creators to express themselves with no one controlling them. Crypto can enable a system of uncensored open platforms that will provide benefits like lower processing fees, better privacy, and a multigenerational payment structure.
Advantages of Crypto payments for adult content platforms
The adult industry has always been an early adopter of the latest technologies in the world. Crypto also was adopted and tried in its nascent stages when the world was just getting to know about crypto. Big companies like Pornhub and Wicked had tried and tested crypto on their platform much before the pandemic happened.
Crypto has no physical form, and its value remains confidential between the sender and receiver. As all the transactions on crypto happen over a blockchain secure network, it leaves no room for banking middlemen to process your transactions. Here are some benefits that crypto payments offer for adult content platforms.
Wider market share
The use of crypto on adult content platforms opens up new demographics and helps your platform reach tech-savvy audiences who are building communities around the crypto market. Providing the option of crypto payments to your customers would mean widening your range and accepting more customers from around the world.
Faster transactional speeds
If there is one thing that bothers the creators most on content platforms like OnlyFans is the delays in payouts due to slow transactional speeds. The usual card transactions take a few days to process, making the creators wait before they get their earnings in their account.
Crypto payments are much faster, which helps in maintaining a smooth cash flow on your platform. Creators receive their earnings quicker and without much hassles. Crypto relies on criteria like block size, block time, transaction fees, network traffic, etc., to provide faster transactional speeds.
Lower transaction fees
Another point of major concern for the creators is the high transaction fees payment gateways take to process their payouts. Crypto has low transaction fees compared to traditional payment gateways and offers a better return to the creators. By using crypto, creators don’t lose out on a large chunk of their earnings as transaction fees.
Better transactional security
Crypto provides full control over a creator’s funds, and no one other than the creator can access the funds without their permission. There are no middlemen involved in cryptos like banks or financial institutions who can access your account. There are very less chances of fraud with crypto as your transactions are protected.
How to build a Crypto gateway on your platform
Before you build and integrate crypto wallets into your content platform, you need to understand the money flow and where you’re going to receive your revenue. There are majorly two revenue streams on a content platform.
Recurring income or subscription income is the major contributor to any creator’s earnings on content platforms. Users subscribe to a creator’s profile by paying a recurring monthly subscription to get access to their exclusive content. Subscriptions help in keeping the cash flow intact on your creator platform and form the base of your revenue model.
The other revenue channel is one-off payments done by users for PPV content, store purchases, tips, paid messaging, etc. This revenue stream is variable and depends on how much users are spending on one-off payments. As it’s easier for many users to buy one-off content whenever they want, this revenue stream also stands a chance of getting good revenue for your platform.
When integrating crypto payment on your content platform, users also would need to add cryptocurrency to their wallets on your platform. Along with this, creators should be able to link a crypto wallet to their profile to receive payments. Your content platform needs to integrate various popular crypto wallets like Coinbase to provide a seamless crypto experience for the users and creators alike.
Popular Crypto wallets
Today there are a lot of crypto wallets available to help you process and transact with your crypto money. Integrating crypto wallets into your content platform will aid the popularity of your platform and make it more secure and user-friendly. Here are a few popular crypto wallets to look out for.
Coinbase
Coinbase is one of the largest cryptocurrency trading platforms where users can buy, sell, and trade over 100 types of cryptocurrencies like Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Dogecoin. Coinbase provides features like fast setup, easy conversions, irreversible transactions, global payments, and more. With powerful turnkey APIs and eCommerce integrations, Coinbase fits well into the creator platform model.
Coingate
The Coingate payment gateway deals in 70+ types of cryptocurrencies for buying, selling, and trading purposes. You can trade in crypto like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and many more through Coingate. Its presence in over 100 countries and 24/7 customer support make Coingate a good choice for your crypto needs.
Bitpay
Bitpay is a crypto wallet that lets you manage multiple wallets on a single screen. Bitpay is loaded with some great features like unlimited transactions, email billing, multiple wallets, a merchant directory, and more. It supports only Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash for transactions.
The main challenge of using Crypto payment gateways for content platforms
As discussed above, the major revenue model for content platforms is through recurring subscriptions. Now, most of the crypto gateways don’t process recurring payments, which can be an issue for creator platforms.
Recurring payments need access to your account to debit the subscription amount automatically every month, which is an issue considering the strict security measures adopted by crypto payment gateways. Secondly, it’s difficult to keep track of cancellations of subscriptions as crypto accounts are managed and can be seen only by the user.
Another issue with recurring payments on crypto gateways is that the platform cannot make changes to the prices of subscriptions directly without the permission of each user. Crypto wallets require the platform to set up a new smart contract for every price change. These all issues make it difficult for crypto gateways to manage recurring payments.
The solution to the challenge
To solve this problem, crypto wallets will need to integrate an API for direct debit at the customer’s end. Wallet platforms like Groundhog and 8x Protocol help platforms create smart contracts that help in regulating recurring payments.
Another workaround for this challenge can be to issue virtual tokens to the user’s account to be deducted as recurring payments for a subscription. The platform will need to figure out how it will manage and tally the token count at the end of every month.
Conclusion
Crypto payments have become an essential part of how transactions are made in today’s world. You can delay the use of crypto on your content platform, but sooner than later, you’ll have to embrace the fact that users are looking for platforms that can deal in crypto payments. And why not. It’s safer, more secure, and enables the users as well as the creators to take control of their money in a better way.