Insights for Creators: Advanced Analytics Dashboard Development Begins
By DeHub Team — 2023-01-03
Development on an advanced analytics dashboard for creators began in Q1 2023, alongside the launch of tokenised uploads with a 90% ad revenue share.
The two are the same project viewed from different ends. Paying creators the overwhelming majority of revenue is meaningless if they cannot see how the figure was reached.
The specific problem on-chain payment creates
On a conventional platform, analytics are an estimate the platform provides and the creator accepts. Views, watch time, revenue — all of it arrives as a number in a dashboard, and there is no independent way to check any of it.
When settlement happens on-chain, that arrangement breaks in an interesting way. The payment is publicly verifiable. If our dashboard says one thing and the chain says another, the creator can see the discrepancy directly.
That is a much harder engineering constraint than it sounds. It means analytics cannot be approximate in the places where they touch money, and it means every rounding decision, every attribution rule and every timing boundary has to reconcile exactly with what the contract did.
Most platform analytics would not survive that test. They are not designed to.
What we set out to build
The brief was narrow on purpose:
- Earnings that reconcile with the chain, per upload, traceable to the transactions that produced them.
- Audience data that is actually actionable — where people stop watching, what they came from, what they did next — rather than a wall of vanity totals.
- Honest attribution. If we cannot determine where a view came from, the dashboard says so rather than assigning it somewhere plausible.
That last one costs engagement. "Unknown" is an unsatisfying category and every product instinct pushes you to guess. Guessing is how creator analytics across the industry became gently fictional.
Why it took a long time
Because it started here and did not finish here, which is why the milestone says development began.
The honest reason is ordering. Analytics for a platform is not one feature — it is a pipeline that has to be correct at every stage, and it can only be as good as the event data underneath it. Rebuilding that foundation properly took considerably longer than putting charts on a screen, and we had a choice between shipping something fast that would quietly mislead people about their income, or taking the time.
We have been burned by the fast version elsewhere. Not here.
What it connects to
The line runs from here to dhbscan.com in 2025, which lets anyone track activity across all DHB contracts, and to the transparency reports published at the end of 2023.
They are the same commitment aimed at different audiences. A creator should be able to verify their own earnings; a holder should be able to verify the protocol's. Neither should have to ask us.
The number we refuse to invent
Attribution for views that arrive without a usable source.
Every analytics product has this problem and almost all of them solve it by distributing the unknowns across the known categories in proportion, which produces a tidy pie chart that is partly fiction. Creators then make real decisions — where to promote, what to make next — on the fictional part.
We show it as unknown. It is an unsatisfying category, it makes our dashboard look less capable than competitors', and it is the only honest option when the underlying data does not support a claim.
That principle is the one thing from this project we would defend hardest, because it is the one that costs us something every time it is applied.