Content creators often find themselves at the mercy of digital platforms that control audience access, distribution, and monetization. Changes in algorithms or monetization policies can drastically affect a creator's livelihood, leaving them with little recourse. Digitalage, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hop-on, Inc. (OTCID: HPNN), is building media infrastructure designed to give creators greater transparency and control over how their work is protected, distributed, and monetized.
Peter Michaels, founder and chairman of Digitalage, emphasizes the importance of ownership over rented access. "Reach is a permission that can be revoked. Ownership is something that survives the permission being revoked," he says. This philosophy is central to Digitalage's approach: creators may own their content, but they often don't own the audience relationship, recommendation systems, payment rails, or appeals processes that platforms maintain.
Digitalage aims to solve this by recording 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 creator monetization in a single workflow. For live content, the goal is to preserve identity, provenance, and rights information from creation through replay.
Transparent moderation is another key component. Digitalage's published framework emphasizes clear rules, visible decisions, human review, and meaningful appeals. Enforcement is focused on harmful conduct rather than the identity or viewpoint of the speaker. Creators should be able to ask: Who made the decision? What specific rule was applied? Was the action based on harmful conduct or merely the identity of the speaker?
Digitalage's Community Rules state that automated systems may act during live broadcasts when repeated detections indicate a potential violation, but creators can request human review afterward. Uploads and replays flagged for consequential enforcement receive human review, and eligible decisions can be appealed.
The company has completed application testing and is in an invite-only launch phase. Its current scope includes live broadcasting, replays, and video-on-demand, with programming across news, sports, events, and faith. Under the Genesis Creator Pilot announced on June 3, participating creators are eligible to receive 85% of gross subscription revenue, with Digitalage retaining a 15% Platform Infrastructure Fee. Creators are also eligible for 50% of net advertising revenue generated by their content.
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 end when the stream does; the system is designed to preserve live events as searchable, indexable replays that may support additional monetization.
This distinction—access is not ownership—is at the heart of Digitalage's thesis. By building an infrastructure layer that records rights and controls, the company aims to give creators more durable control over their content, distribution, and monetization, while keeping the experience simple. Learn more about Digitalage's approach to creator ownership.
