The Young Turks, the world's largest online news show with over 2 billion annual impressions and 2.2 million YouTube subscribers has begun accepting bitcoin for donations since last week.
The Young Turks & Bitcoin
In a news report with Ex-Baltimore Cop Michael Wood on Abusive Police Culture, the TYT network briefly displayed their bitcoin wallet QR code and said: “Got some bitcoin burning a hole in your online wallet? Great, because you can use this QR code to support TYT. Remember, every little bitcoin helps.”
David Koller of the Young Turks network confirmed to Cointelegraph that the network will indeed continue to accept bitcoin.
The effect of the TYT coverage on bitcoin is significant as videos and news reports of the TYT network generate around 100,000 views on average. However, out of the last 20 videos posted on YouTube, this was the only video mentioning their bitcoin donation campaign, for now.
The Young Turks Network products, services and reports are entirely in digital format so a bitcoin option makes sense compared other centralized payment options like PayPal, which have the tendency to freeze and hold payments.
Since the display of their bitcoin wallet’s QR code 5 days ago, in one of their videos which generated around 80,000 views, the TYT network has received over 30 donations. Although the total amount is fairly moderate (~US$116), 30 donations over the last 5 days is a pretty good start, especially since the campaign was largely unannounced.
Response
The bitcoin community has responded positively to the TYT’s campaign so far. Some stated that they would donate for the sake of displaying the bitcoin donation message at the end of each video.
One reddit comment read, “Accepting bitcoin would be a logical move for these guys though, considering their product is entirely digital content. I almost want to donate just so they keep that message up.”
This is the first major bitcoin acceptance in the news industry since the partnership between Time, Inc. and Coinbase in December of last year which resulted in not only Time but also Fortune, Health, This Old House, and Travel + Leisure to accepting bitcoin for the last seven months.
At the time, Coinbase noted the potential of fusing cryptocurrency and online publishing, saying:
“We believe this is an important step in helping the publishing industry understand and explore new business models that can be enabled with bitcoin.”
