A Note for Young Creators, and the Adults Helping Them

By DeHub Team — 2026-08-28

If you are fourteen and posting, or you are the parent or manager of someone who is, this article is about a single distinction that almost nobody makes early enough.

Earnings are what the work paid you. The asset is what keeps paying after you stop.

The law has started, belatedly, to protect the first one. Illinois moved first — from July 2024, a set share of earnings from content featuring a minor has to go into a trust the child can access at eighteen. California followed with AB 1880 from January 2025, extending the old Coogan Law, written for child film actors in 1939, to child content creators. More than a dozen other states have introduced versions of the same idea.

These are good laws and they were overdue. They also address the smaller half of the problem.

Nothing in any of them touches the question of what the young creator actually owns — because in almost every case, the answer is: an account, on a platform, held at that platform's discretion, under terms an adult clicked through years ago.

What "taken away" actually looks like

This is not a hypothetical risk invented to sell an alternative. Between roughly 2017 and 2019, in a period creators call the Adpocalypse, advertisers pulled budgets over brand-safety concerns and platform policy changed repeatedly in response. Channels were removed from monetisation, in some cases over videos that had been online for years. Established creators reported ad income dropping by as much as 80% with no notice. Reinstatement, where it happened at all, often required public pressure — and revenue lost in the meantime was generally not repaid.

Then there is the children's-content layer specifically. After the FTC's $170 million settlement with Google in 2019 over children's privacy, platforms introduced "made for kids" designations that materially changed how child-directed content could be monetised and how its audience could be reached. Creators whose entire category was child-directed did not do anything wrong. The rules simply changed underneath a business that had been built to the previous set.

The pattern is worth naming precisely, because it recurs: the risk to a young creator is almost never that they fail. It is that they succeed on ground they were only ever renting.

The contract nobody would sign on paper

Here is a thought experiment for the adults in the room.

Imagine an agent brings you a contract for your fourteen-year-old. The terms are:

• The company hosts all of the work, and can remove any of it at any time.
• The company sets the pay rate, does not disclose the formula, and may change it without notice.
• The audience the child builds is the company's record, cannot be exported, and cannot be contacted directly.
• The company may terminate the entire relationship, keeping the audience, with no compensation and limited appeal.
• The term is indefinite.

No competent parent, manager or lawyer signs that. It would be professional negligence.

That is, functionally, the arrangement every young creator is in by default. It does not read like a contract because nobody negotiates it and nothing is signed in a room. But it is the deal.

What to do instead — practical, not ideological

None of this is an argument for keeping a young person off the big platforms. That would be daft advice: that is where the audience is, that is where discovery happens, and a fourteen-year-old told to publish only somewhere obscure will, correctly, ignore you.

The argument is for not having exactly one home.

Own the archive. Whatever else happens, keep the original files. Not the platform's copy — yours, backed up, off the platform. Careers have been rebuilt from an archive and cannot be rebuilt without one.

Build one direct line. An email list, a Discord, a mailing address — anything where the audience can be reached without asking a platform for permission. Ten thousand followers you cannot contact is a smaller asset than a thousand people you can.

Publish somewhere the work is provably yours. This is the part we build. On DeHub, a post can be minted on-chain to the creator's wallet, the moment it is published or later, so the ownership record exists independently of the platform. Uploads can be free, pay-per-view or subscriber-gated per piece, and the ad revenue share is published — up to 90% — rather than set by an undisclosed formula. Subscriptions are tradable and pay the original creator a royalty when resold.

Keep the money legible. Whatever platform is involved, keep clean records of what the child earned and from what. The new trust laws set a floor, not a ceiling, and the parent or manager who can produce a clear ledger at eighteen is in a very different position from one who cannot.

The specific warning for parents and managers

Two things, said directly.

The first is that a young creator's leverage is highest before they need it. The time to establish an owned home base is while the channel is small and nothing depends on it — not after a strike, a demonetisation, or a policy change makes it urgent. Everything in this article is easy at 500 followers and painful at 500,000.

The second is harder. When a child's content is the household's income, the incentive to keep feeding whichever platform is currently paying becomes extremely strong, and the incentive to diversify becomes weak precisely when diversifying matters most. The trust laws exist because that pressure has, in documented cases, not resolved in the child's favour. Assume it applies to you too, and build the alternative early, while the decision is still cheap.

For the young creator reading this

You will be told your follower count is the achievement. It is the scoreboard, not the asset.

The asset is: the work you still have copies of, the people who would follow you to a new address, and the ability to be paid without asking permission. Those three things are the whole business. Everything else is distribution — useful, replaceable, and someone else's.

Build the three. Use the platforms hard while they work for you. Just do not confuse being popular somewhere with owning something.

Frequently asked questions

What do the new child influencer laws actually cover?

Broadly, they require a share of earnings from content featuring a minor to be set aside in a trust the child can access as an adult — Illinois from July 2024, California's AB 1880 from January 2025, with more than a dozen states following. They govern the money. They do not give the child ownership of the account, the audience or the work.

Is there an age requirement for DeHub?

DeHub is not designed for children, and like other social platforms it has minimum-age requirements in its terms. In practice, for creators under that age the account and the wallet sit with the parent or manager, which is how child creator accounts are already handled on the major platforms.

Should a young creator leave YouTube or TikTok?

No. They are the best discovery engines available and there is no advantage in abandoning them. The argument is to stop depending on one of them exclusively, and to have an owned archive, a direct line to the audience and a home base where the work is provably theirs.

Does the child need to understand crypto?

No. Sign-in works through Google, Apple, email or SMS with a wallet created in the background and gas sponsored, so publishing does not require buying anything or understanding wallets. The adult managing the account should understand where the earnings settle.

What is the single most important step?

Keep the original files, off-platform, from day one. It is free, it takes minutes, and it is the one thing that makes recovery possible after any of the failures described above.