In the digital economy, content creators often find themselves building businesses on rented land. While they may own their work, they depend on platforms for audience access, distribution, and monetization—rules that can change without notice, leaving creators with little recourse. Digitalage, a subsidiary of Hop-on, Inc. (OTCID: HPNN), is building media infrastructure designed to address this imbalance, offering creators greater control and transparency over how their content is managed.
“Reach is a permission that can be revoked. Ownership is something that survives the permission being revoked,” said Peter Michaels, founder and chairman of Digitalage. This philosophy underpins the company's approach, which aims to provide creators with durable ownership of their audience relationships and monetization streams, rather than relying on the whims of search engines and social platforms.
When a search engine changes its ranking algorithm, a publisher may lose visibility with limited recourse. When a social platform alters its monetization rules, a creator can quickly lose a primary revenue source. Moving to another platform or filing a takedown notice may solve immediate problems, but neither provides lasting control over audience access, distribution, or monetization. The audience may not follow, copies may continue to circulate, and payment terms can change.
Digitalage is building a system that records who created a media asset, when it was created, and what rights and controls apply. This information is intended to carry through live broadcasting, replay distribution, searchable archives, and monetization in a single workflow. For live content, the goal is to preserve identity, provenance, and rights information from creation through replay, ensuring that creators maintain a link to their work.
Transparent moderation is also a key component. Digitalage's published framework emphasizes clear rules, visible decisions, human review, meaningful appeals, and enforcement focused on harmful conduct rather than the identity or viewpoint of the speaker. When content is restricted, creators should be able to ask: Who made the decision? Who can see the affected content? What specific rule was applied? Was the action based on harmful conduct or merely on who is speaking? The company's Community Rules state that automated systems may act during live broadcasts when repeated detections indicate a potential violation, but creators can request post-action human review. Uploads and replays flagged for consequential enforcement receive human review, and eligible decisions may be appealed.
These controls are designed to give creators greater visibility into how their content is protected, distributed, and monetized, and how enforcement decisions can be reviewed. Digitalage has completed application testing and is currently in an invite-only launch while refining the experience and onboarding initial creator cohorts. Its product scope includes live broadcasting, replays, and video-on-demand, with programming planned across news, sports, events, and faith.
Under the Genesis Creator Pilot, announced June 3, participating creators are eligible to receive 85% of gross subscription revenue, while Digitalage retains a 15% Platform Infrastructure Fee. Creators may also receive 50% of net advertising revenue generated by their content, subject to program terms. This revenue-sharing model is intended to reward creators for their work and provide a sustainable income stream.
Digitalage's strategy is to work with creators who already have established communities and give those audiences reasons to stay and return. The value doesn't have to end when the stream does; the system is designed to preserve live events as replays that remain searchable and indexable, supporting additional monetization post-broadcast, subject to creator settings.
This distinction—access is not ownership—lies at the heart of Digitalage's mission. By building an infrastructure layer that gives creators more durable control over their content, distribution, and monetization, Digitalage aims to empower creators in an environment where they often have little say. As the company continues to develop and expand, it may offer a new model for creator-platform relationships, one where ownership is not just a claim but a reality.
