Worldwide Creators: Partnerships Spanning 15 Countries

By DeHub Team — 2024-04-04

By Q2 2024 we had established creator partnerships spanning 15 countries.

Why geography matters more than it should

A streaming platform is theoretically borderless. In practice almost nothing about a creator's business is.

Payment rails differ. Whether a token payout is convenient or a compliance problem differs. Which platforms dominate differs — the assumption that everyone is on the same three services collapses the moment you leave a handful of markets. Even what "going live" means socially varies enormously.

Fifteen countries is not a large number. What made it useful was that it forced those differences into view early, before we had built too much on the assumption that our own market was representative.

What we learned per market

Three findings that changed the product:

Payout beats percentage. Our 90% revenue share on tokenised uploads is the strongest number we have, and in several markets it was not the deciding factor. What decided it was whether the creator could actually get the value out, in local terms, without a bank problem. A generous share that is difficult to realise loses to a smaller one that lands cleanly.

Mobile-first is not a preference. In a number of these markets it is the only thing. That validated the React Native rebuild and the custom game engine built for old hardware more than any decision made in the UK.

Transaction cost decides participation. Where fees are meaningful relative to income, they do not reduce activity, they eliminate it. That fed directly into the move to Base and eventually into dropping Ethereum mainnet.

How the partnerships came about

Mostly through relationships rather than outreach. The founders were building what became the UK's largest TikTok partner agency in the same period, and the Dubai event that quarter opened the Middle East.

Creator networks are personal. A partnership in a new market almost always starts with one creator who already trusts someone we know, which is slow and does not scale but is the only version that works.

What we would do differently

Go narrower. Fifteen countries in a quarter meant spreading support thin, and a partnership without proper support is a logo on a slide.

The subsequent work — the ambassador programme with 50 vacancies and the creator education curriculum in 2025 — was largely a correction. Fewer relationships, properly resourced, beats more of them announced.

The number we should have reported

Fifteen countries is a reach metric, and reach metrics are the ones most worth distrusting. A more useful figure would have been how many of those partnerships were still producing uploads six months later, and we did not publish it because for a while we were not measuring it well enough to be confident.

We are now. It is the standard we hold this kind of announcement to internally, and it is why later creator milestones in this archive are framed around what a programme does rather than how many places it touches.

The general point applies well beyond creator partnerships. Any metric that counts how many things you have started, rather than how many are still running, will look better the less carefully you follow up — which is precisely why it is the one most often published.