Adult entertainment website Tube8, owned Pornhub’s parent company MindGeek, recently moved to to start rewarding adult content viewers with cryptocurrency.
Currently, Tube8 attracts over 150 million visitors to its webpages each month. It has over 10 million registered users, and is planning to place its porn streaming platform onto a blockchain-based network.
In a message sent to Hard Fork, Tube8’s management stated it had partnered with Vice Industry Token (VIT), an adult entertainment crypto and blockchain provider, in order to completely tokenize its platform.
Offering Crypto Rewards
Reportedly, this partnership aims to let Tube8’s users receive VIT tokens for simply watching videos on its website. According to the adult website’s announcement, the crypto token implementation phase is scheduled to start towards the end of this year.
Notably, with this initiative, Tube8 is set to become the first major pornography website to offer crypto rewards to its users for merely watching its content. Compared to other online service providers, the adult entertainment industry has historically been a lot faster at adopting new technologies.
In fact, the popular “Girls Gone Wild” series led to the mainstream introduction and adoption of cable TV. Additionally, in the early 90s, peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing programs became popular because a lot of people were using them to distribute pornographic films and images.
A “Paradigm Shift”
With this recent development, MindGeek’s Tube8 subsidiary could see its 150 million monthly users help pave the way for an increasing number of people adopting cryptocurrencies, not only in the porn industry, but possibly in others as well.
Robin Turner, a Tube8 representative stated,
“For as long as I can remember, getting paid to watch porn was always a pipedream; one that was always dreamed about, but never fully realized. Now however, with the introduction of VIT, we are marking a paradigm shift in how people consume adult entertainment.”
Turner added,
“As opposed to having to fork over money to consume content, which some sites require, our users will get paid to consume our free content. The more they interact with our videos, the more money they earn.”
Although Tube8 did not comment on the way its tokenized rewards system would calculate rewards, it is likely there will be some limit to what users can earn. The limit may be placed in order to make it difficult for users to exploit Tube8’s platform for large profits.
According to Turner, there will be no extra charge or fees associated with using VIT’s crypto tokens, but both Vice Industry Token and Tube8 aim “to [expand] their user bases and [increase] engagement with their respective products through [this] collaboration.”
While this initiative may seem promising for Tube8 and MindGeek, which also partnered with the Verge (XVG) platform earlier to allow users to pay for porn with XVG, there are some red flags.
Playboy Lawsuit
On August 13, reports revealing Playboy Enterprises, the company that introduced the popular softcore porn magazine Playboy, had filed a lawsuit against Global Blockchain Technologies (BLOC) for not following through on its commitment to incorporate Vice Industry Token’s VIT cryptocurrency into Playboy’s online website emerged.
Despite all the controversy, a Tube8 representative said that the company believes “[VIT] is the only cryptocurrency that is designed specifically for tokenizing and rewarding viewers of free content on tube sites.” Notably, Vice Industry Token has also partnered with pornstar Stormy Daniels who made headlines after claiming that she had an affair with US president Donald Trump.
