Brad Jasper is an American developer with a track record of creating interesting projects – everything from an app to turn videos into podcasts to a website to help remote workers. Now he’s focussing on Bitcoin SV with his latest project Bit.sv, a platform for every kind of digital content creator, including coaches, journalists, artists or traders, allowing them to offer premium content, monetized with Bitcoin SV.
Bit.sv is Brad’s second BSV project, the first being Open Directory, where you can earn money for submitting useful or popular links. He says it’s “Reddit on the blockchain”. Although Open Directory is still active, Brad says he’s now committed to making Bit.sv a success, because it’s “the big one”. After working on many different projects, he thinks he’s found the sweet spot between what he wants to make and what people would pay for:
“If I could work on one idea for the rest of my life it would be this one. I really care about getting creators independent …I think the most impactful thing I can do is to work on my best idea, which is to get as many people as possible working on their best ideas. And that’s just about the longest lever I think I can pull. I’ve got other projects but this is the top of the mountain. This is the mission.”
The idea of Bit.sv is to provide a way for the makers of specialist content to reach niche audiences and be paid for their work. As Brad explains: “with advertising, you need relatively large audiences. And that’s actually pretty difficult to grow for most creators. So the kind of niche content that a lot of people are interested in, the long tail content where a lot of the stuff kind of bubbles up into the mainstream, it’s really difficult to make a living doing that kind of thing. Bit.SV is really a platform to incentivise the kind of interesting, weird, fun, cool content that we all really want, but it’s difficult to make the time for.”
It’s easy to see why creators would like a chance to be paid. But will customers be willing to pay for things they might otherwise expect to see for free? Brad is confident: “the content just has to be better. It has to be better than anything you can get anywhere online for free.” Finding those niche markets is going to be key: “so if you’re a yoga teacher, not just doing yoga, but yoga for programmers who spend ten hours a day at the computer. Putting things in people’s language adds value for them and people I think are willing to pay for that.”
As for the business model of Bit.sv, the creators can decide how much, if any, of their content they want to offer for free and then set up a paywall at whatever price they choose. “We take a 10 percent cut from the paywalls and there’s going to be some other services on the site that we’ll take a similar cut for.”
Brad doesn’t only want to be the business owner, but plans to contribute content to the site too: “I’d also just like to be a creator on Bit.sv, to be kind of Creator Zero and show people how it’s done and make an independent living from it myself. I think there’s a lot of really interesting opportunities for creators that I’m excited to kind of burst open the doors and let people start playing with it and see what they do.”
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