What if you were rewarded for what you watch online? Would you consume more media or would you consume more media from the companies rewarding you for doing so?

Enter Freckle TV.

The web3 media company aims to give back to its community in the form of rewards as a “thank you” for the audience’s engagement—rewards that are uniquely tied to a brand sponsor.

“The goal is to have a number of different, interactive, gamified pieces of content programming across our platform that players can sign up to play and earn rewards for engaging, interacting and being part of the experience,” Ian Feiner, Freckle TV’s founder and chief executive officer, said to me in a recent interview. Feiner—who was also a recent guest on Decential Media’s Lights Camera Crypto podcast—wants to incentivize audiences to then exchange those in-game rewards for things of value.

“We work with an amazing array of collectibles partners from Bandai, Fungo, Pop, Diamond Select, to digital assets from the NFT communities we collaborate with,” Feiner said. “The prize pool is pretty robust and diverse—and more times than not—there’s going to be something in there that you really want.”

For one of the first times, web3 and blockchain technology allow viewers to be rewarded for what they might already be watching, or for taking a chance on a new show. 

“We believe you should be rewarded for the time you spend and where you spend it,” Feiner said. “Audiences and eyeballs around the world are being ‘harvested,’ which I think is the wrong word for it, but that’s what it is. Corporate entertainment cuts heads and harvests eyeballs. The gray hairs of our industry have gotten really good at that, and when we’re treating everyone like heads and eyeballs, we’re treating them like a number. When we treat people like a number, they are no longer being valued.”

Read more: Google’s Product Director Turned Web3 Founder Andrey Doronichev Warns of Deep to Cheap Fakes

Freckle aims to balance the scales by giving back to audiences and consumers in a transaction that—for decades—has largely favored content distributors. FreckeTV wants to flip that. “If people think and feel a company/brand cares about their time, they’re going to be more willing to consume their content,” Feiner said.

He continued, “You remember Box Tops for Education? General Mills partnered with a cause and incentivized purchasing with rewards—literally money. I’m pretty sure you could have mailed in Box Tops and had checks sent to your school. You had incentives driving gamification, backed by a good cause, powered by a brand that everybody knows. So when you’re going to the cereal aisle now, and you’re looking at two similar cereals—one from General Mills and one from another brand—and you see there are rewards from buying a General Mills cereal, where are you going to spend your money? We’re really building on that same ideology with Freckle TV. ”

If the idea of a media company rewarding you for time spent on its platform seems novel to you, it is. Imagine an NBC or Netflix giving you rewards for consuming their content. Feiner believes as more people start to care about where they’re spending their time on media and if their time is being valued by entertainment companies, it will be up to the media companies to figure out how to deliver the value consumers are seeking.

“We’re all starting to realize that time is a diminishing resource, one that is extraordinarily valuable,” Feiner said. “We do a lot of those mental gymnastics or organizational work in our head when it comes to money, but I don’t think we do it enough with time. The way we treat time is very different.”

While it’s entirely subjective whether a show or movie or piece of art is “good” or “bad,” Feiner thinks the rewards incentive will help mitigate feelings of viewers  “wasting time.” But is it ever really time wasted?

Sure, viewers may have an opinion if they liked or didn’t like a television show or movie, but it’s the experience that makes audiences participate willingly. For some it’s an escape, for others it’s a means of being inspired—the list goes on. It remains to be seen if those same audiences will be swayed to specific platforms because of rewards incentives.

“For us, we have a direct feedback loop [with our community] which is really exciting,” Feiner said. “We have a safety net of, ‘Oh wow, this game show sucked, but at least I earned a ticket.’ That person can go into our feedback channels and say, ‘This game show sucked, let’s not renew it.’ We can then take a vote and decide which shows from season one get renewed for season two. In that way, our audience members have a voice.”

Integrating the community’s voice into Freckle’s decision making process for its slate of shows is right in line with the web3 ethos of the company’s formation.

“This year, we launched a ‘May the 4th’ StarWars event for holders of our NFT, where we officially partnered with Disney on the day and made it an official promo to be a ‘Master Jedi Trivia Lord’ and win a trip to Disneyland,” he said. “The Freckle TV platform was StarsWars themed and we had thousands of people play the game. We asked StarWars questions, gave away StarWars prizes, played StarWars music, and tapped into the StarWars community. It was like, ‘Hey, you like Disney and StarWars? Spend 40 minutes in this livestream game with an incentive of prizes and a grand prize trip for two to Disneyland.’”

Another example of how Freckle’s branded-rewards are helping build community around their content was seen through its partnership with Jarritos. “Jarritos is a heritage Mexican soda brand sold all over the United States and in other countries, and they’re also in web3, making them the ideal partner for us,” Feiner said. “We did a Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) themed trivia event where I dressed up as the bones character and we went to Old Town, San Diego for The Day of the Dead celebration. We asked guests questions and put the Jarritos brand into an experience that not only supported its brand identity, but also supported Mexican heritage and cultural identity—the web3 ethos—all in one unique week of trivia.”

What came next was a confluence of digital and real life activity that helped further the community building around Jarritos and Freckle TV.

“What we saw afterward was people all over the country trying to find Jarritos in their local grocery stores,” Feiner said. “We had Discord threads and channels of hosts in our server of people going to Walmart and taking pictures in front of Jarritos displays, forming fan clubs of their favorite flavors, so much so that we officiated it by breaking up our 10,000 person Discord server into four teams and naming them after Jarritos flavors. We then let those teams run competitions—art competitions, meme competitions—all to earn points for their teams, which Jarritos supported with rewards.”