Time Inc Begins Accepting Bitcoin

This Tuesday, Time Inc became the first magazine publisher to accept Bitcoin as a payment method for subscriptions to four of its most popular magazine titles; Health, This is Old House and Travel, Leisure and Fortune. Time Inc. has stepped into the world of cryptocurrencies, a few days after Microsoft’s announcement of acceptance.

The magazine publisher partnered with Coinbase to implement Bitcoin as an accepted payment method. Coinbase has recently had a noticeable role in popularizing Bitcoin as a modern, easy to use and safe payment option, as it also partnered with Google and Overstock.com to implement Bitcoin as a payment method for items sold by both companies. Coinbase pointed to the possibility of expanding the partnership with Time Inc., in a recent blog post, to include “micropayments”, which would allow subscribers to pay tiny amounts, e.g. fractions of a cent, for individual news articles via a “one-click tipping application”.

In a recent statement, the executive vice president of Time’s consumer marketing sector, Lynne Biggar, emphasized that his company is always seeking innovative options that would simplify purchasing subscriptions, and that he believes that Bitcoin will help the company reach this goal.

It is worth mentioning that though Time Inc’s acceptance of Bitcoin is certainly note worthy and a sign of the times with bigger brands beginning to take Cryptocurrencies more seriously, they are not the first publisher to do so. A few months ago, The Chicago Sun-Times, a publishing company based in the USA, partnered with a startup company called Bitwall to accept Bitcoin as a payment method for the company’s subscription services.

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