Creator Economy Reimagined: Tokenized Uploads & 90% Ad Revenue Share
By DeHub Team — 2023-01-02
In Q1 2023 we released tokenised uploads with on-chain ad revenue sharing, with creators earning 90%.
Why 90, and why it is not the point
Ninety percent is a marketing number in most hands. Platforms announce generous splits during growth phases and revise them once creators have built audiences they cannot easily move.
That is the actual problem, and the split is not what solves it. What matters is whether the terms are a property of the upload or a policy of the platform.
On DeHub the revenue share is attached to the tokenised upload and settled on-chain. It is not a rate we publish and honour. It is how the payment executes.
The distinction is exactly the one we had already made for NFT royalties the previous year — and by 2023, that argument had been settled publicly in the NFT market, where marketplace-honoured royalties had quietly become optional and then default-off. Creators who had relied on a convention discovered it was a courtesy.
We would rather not run the same experiment on people's income.
What "tokenised upload" means here
Not that the video is an NFT in the collectible sense. It means the upload has an on-chain representation carrying its ownership and its economics — who made it, who is owed what, and under what terms.
Consequences that follow from that:
- Payment does not depend on us processing it. Settlement is a property of the transaction.
- The terms are inspectable by the creator, before they upload, without a support ticket.
- They cannot be revised retroactively. A change applies to new uploads. It cannot reach back into the ones already published.
That third point is the one traditional platforms cannot offer, structurally, because their terms live in an agreement they control.
What the 90% costs us
It means we operate on a tenth of ad revenue on those uploads, and we pay the full delivery cost of the video.
That is only survivable because of infrastructure work done specifically to make it survivable — the video compression that cut bandwidth costs by around 60% in mid-2022, and later the custom CDN.
Those two facts are directly connected. A generous revenue share is not a values statement, it is an engineering outcome. Platforms that keep the majority of revenue are frequently doing so because their cost base gives them no choice.
What we underestimated
Adoption is not driven by the split. It is driven by audience.
A creator with an established following on another platform is not choosing between 90% and 55%. They are choosing between a known audience and an unknown one, and the split is a rounding error against that. We learned this slowly and at some expense.
It is why so much of the work that followed — the analytics dashboard started the same quarter, the creator education curriculum, the ambassador programme — is about helping creators build an audience rather than about paying them more of what they already earn.
Where it stands
Three years on, the mechanism has not changed and has not needed to. Uploads carry their own economics, settlement happens on-chain, and no revision we could make would reach backwards into work already published.
What has changed is our honesty about what that buys. It does not make a creator successful. It removes one specific category of risk — the risk that the terms you accepted are quietly not the terms you end up with — and leaves every other difficulty in place. That is a narrower promise than most platforms make and it is one we can actually keep.