Taringa!, Argentina’s largest social network, has seen an average increase of 40% in content creation since the integration of bitcoin last month.
On April 21, Taringa! launched an initiative called Taringa! Creadores, which enables users worldwide to receive the payments for ad revenues and incentives in bitcoin. Within days of its launch, Taringa! received thousands of requests from existing users. As PR manager Agustina Fourquet told Cointelegraph on April 23:
“We have users in all Latin America, the U.S. and Spain. The first day that Taringa! Creadores was launched, in less than 24 hours, without any kind of marketing or broadcasting, 2,000 users sent us mails interested in participating.”
Similar to YouTube, incentives are based on the “social value” of user-generated content. Users also have the ability to tip other content creators in bitcoin. Since Taringa! Creadores is still in beta, however, the bitcoin initiative currently supports no more than 2,000 invited users, selected based on their popularity as content providers.
All 2,000 Taringa! Creadores users received a Xapo wallet and then received payments in bitcoin for their advertising revenues and incentives based on the social value of their content. They are also allowed to tip each other with bitcoin, along with the daily points they can disperse throughout the network. The issued points can be converted to bitcoin and ultimately can be cashed out as Argentinian pesos.
Unlike previous traditional payment platforms, most notably PayPal, the users are not required to wait for a certain period of time, or pay transaction or conversion fees for their ad revenues. Instead, Taringa! Creadores sends the payments directly and instantaneously to the Xapo Wallet, allowing users to either cash out to their native currency, or keep the bitcoins, hoping to see a short-term increase in the value of bitcoin.
The speed and the low costs of bitcoin transactions has encouraged users to create more content, causing a surge of content creation growth. In a blog post, Taringa! Co-Founder Hernan Botbol stated:
"We have always wanted to offer a financial reward to our users because we believe that it is fair. We want more people to publish on Taringa! and devote their time exclusively for Taringa!”
According to OroyFinanzas.com, Botbol believes that Taringa! Creadores will support millions of users by 2016, as he explained, "If bitcoin will someday achieve widespread adoption, it surely will in Argentina.”
