While teleshopping might possibly remind you of your grandma’s old TV and the times of dial-up phones, its newest iterations are all the rage now. Video commerce has become a sophisticated, professional industry worth $137 billion a year in China alone. The sellers are something between your favorite actor and a Twitch streamer, and their scripted performances backed by sizable crews are nothing short of a spectacle. The hosts skillfully combine the principles of a game show, theatre, shop, and auction house.
Trading.TV, now in closed beta, got inspired to embrace the creator economy era in the area of investing and is looking to recruit entertaining financially savvy streamers. Their job? To translate money into “human” language, attracting a younger audience and people who would never think of investing before.
Streamers, Trading.TV is looking for you
Upon the launch, Trading.TV raised 6.1M seed funding and opened a $1M Creator Fund to motivate the first streamers to join. The platform plans to offer content about various financial assets: be it stocks, cryptocurrencies, NFTs, or valuable collectibles. Viewers will be able to buy, sell and trade, all in real time while watching the live streams.
The platform has a bold vision: it claims to represent the future of investing. While that remains to be seen, it is certainly spearheading the idea to bring fintech and the creator economy together.
“By building a platform that is digitally native, values diversity of interests and assets, and puts inclusion at its center, we hope to unlock financial wellbeing for millions of people that haven’t previously felt welcome in the financial conversation,” said Trading.TV Founder and CEO Tobias Heaslip. According to him, the goal is to “empower and excite younger generations to start thinking about their financial futures sooner”, so they can capitalize on their investments to lead the lives they want. The platform should become publicly available this fall.
Could this move truly be the future of investing? Some say it’s possible, as the market certainly exists. “They’re trying to basically popularize this intersection between finance and games by way of feeding into the retail-based trading that’s going on,” said Joost van Dreunen, an adjunct assistant professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, for Business Insider. “There is a market there. There is a demand there. The meme stocks have proven as much.”
