YouTube channels rise and fall. It is a story told time and time again, but none of these stories are quite like the story of TechHives because only TechHives can claim to be the first channel successfully tokenized thanks to MediaToken.

Inception

The story of TechHives’s birth, like so many origin stories in the tech world, involves ramen. Late one night, Yura Levanov was eating his reconstituted dried noodles alone in his office when he put his foot down. He’d had enough of suffering through a job he no longer liked. So he decided to do something about it.

Taking the Risk

He and Alex Nosov, a musician who was longing for freedom from the corporate world, decided to found a production company. With the help of Alexander Bulgakov, they launched a YouTube channel in 2017 and named it TechHives. The channel is focused on seeing how emerging technology like blockchain, AI, and virtual reality could impact culture. Initially, the channel did well. But, as is to be expected, instead of investing time into attracting funding to the project, the intrepid founders spent their time developing content such as Blockchainsky, a show demystifying the world of blockchain, RATE TH!S, a review program, and One Million Phones ago, a series about the history of telecommunications.

The Perils of Trying to Earn Money on YouTube

But sadly, this focus on good content, while bringing acclaim to the channel, did not bring the funds that were expected. In December, an angel investor gave the channel $50,000. That seems like a lot of money until it’s put in the context of the expenses incurred by the channel just trying to make better content for its viewers: it bought MacBook Pros for $4,800, a $3,900 editing station, cameras for $4,300, lenses for $3,200, lighting panels for $3,750, and had other immediate expenses of $8,000. This adds up to $27,950, or half of that initial investment. Add to that new crew members and new locations, and the investment seems paltry. The creators didn’t have the time to fundraise and didn’t want to make mediocre content to cater to the capricious YouTube ad algorithm to generate quick revenue. This led to a crisis. In March 2018, the financial situation was so dire that half the team had to abandon the effort for better-paying jobs.

A Solution Found

In June 2018, attending VidCon, the main YouTube conference, TechHives stumbled upon something they hadn’t expected: MediaToken. With private investment drying up and their ad revenue not cutting it, TechHives considered a donation-based model to keep their channel going, but quickly rejected the possibility. This made the meeting between TechHives and MediaToken truly lucky.

MediaToken’s Funding Innovation

MediaToken offered them an alternate way to generate revenue. It could do this because it is focused on taking real businesses and assets, in this case a YouTube channel, and using blockchain technology to tokenize them. It is just one in a series of products in the BANKEX ecosystem that takes real world assets and tokenizes them. Essentially, what this means is that MediaToken takes all the important channel metrics — views, subscribers, likes, etc. — and amalgamates them to create a crypto token. YouTube channels, as well as the other social media platforms that can be tokenized with MediaToken, offer a fertile starting ground for tokenization because all the important information is obvious and immediately available. Comments, likes, subscribers — all of it is documented and provided simply and easily. This makes generating a crypto token easier in a digital sphere as compared to other upcoming BANKEX projects — tokenizing a used car for example. But that’s an article for another day.

So Why TechHives?

The partnership was perfect because of TechHive’s specific problems. The creators were growing, but wanted to upgrade their content without sacrificing their time to fundraising or trading their content’s quality for better ad revenue. This was the precise problem MediaToken’s asset tokenization solution was aimed at fixing. Their stats were good, too, as you can see below. Their views were on an upward swing that they wanted to be boosted with a little help from MediaToken.

With the tokenization of the TechHives, the creators, fans, and investors formed a profit sharing collective in which, as soon as the channel starts generating a profit via traditional means, those early investors in the channel will receive a portion of the revenue thanks to the sharing guaranteed by the tokens they purchased.

A Launchpad for so Much More

So TechHives took the plunge and became the first tokenized YouTube channel. Thanks to tokenization, new important equipment could be bought to upgrade the channel’s content. This then increased the growth rate of views to the point where the channel is now rapidly approaching a staggering view count of three million. But of course it doesn’t stop there. TechHives is planning on only growing bigger and better.

But you don’t have to take this all at face value.

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