YouTube pays once a month, through AdSense, and only after Google has done its accounting.
Spotify pays through a distributor that takes its own cut on the way through, and the per-stream rate has been an open joke for a decade. TikTok’s native payments are barely visible; the real money lives in sponsorship emails and bank transfers that never touch the app where the work shipped. In film and television, the payment arrives in installments, audited twice, and reaches the team months later through accountants reconciling spreadsheets by hand.
None of this is monetisation. It’s accounts receivable. The work is yours; the dollar sits in someone else’s system, waiting.
Monetisation is the answer to a single question: when an audience watches the work, how does the money get to the people who own it, and how fast? For the last twenty years every answer has been some version of “the platform holds it, calculates it, and pays it out later.” JubJub answers it differently: the payment runs while the work runs, in fractions of a cent every second, going directly to the wallets of the rights holders.
Where the dollar lives
A viewer’s dollar passes through different systems before it reaches the people who made the work. Here’s the route on each.
Descriptive, not aspirational. Platform behaviour as documented in current creator and developer policies, May 2026.
01What it meansWhat creator monetisation actually means.
Why the delay is the real problem
Monetisation is, at its core, a delay problem. Every existing system receives a dollar from the audience, holds it, calculates a share, and then pays it out later. Sometimes weeks later, sometimes months, sometimes a quarter. The longer the dollar sits in someone else’s account, the more it gets eaten by intermediaries who feel entitled to a piece simply because they had access to the dollar first.
The original sin in creator payments isn’t the size of the cut. It’s the existence of the gap. Close the gap, and most of the friction goes with it.
Today’s default isn’t monetisation. It’s accounts receivable.
What gets called “monetisation” today is mostly a reporting layer over delayed payments. The shape of the delay depends on where the work lives.
- YouTube. Google calculates your earnings, holds them, and pays once a month into a bank account, minus its take. You see the dashboard, not the money.
- Spotify. Streams convert to fractions of a cent on a schedule that pays a distributor first. The distributor takes its own cut. What lands in the creator’s account is whatever’s left.
- TikTok and Meta. Native payments are negligible. The real money is sponsorships, brokered by email, paid by bank transfer thirty to ninety days after delivery, often after a follow-up or three.
- Film and television. Multi-year licensing deals paid in installments, with manual splits done by an accountant. The audit happens twice. The reconciliation happens months later.
All of it requires the dollar to sit somewhere it doesn’t belong before reaching the people who own the work. All of it requires trust that the platform, the distributor, the brand, or the accountant will follow through. Some of that trust gets honoured. Some of it doesn’t. Either way, the friction is the system, not the exception.
The original sin in creator payments isn’t the size of the cut. It’s the existence of the gap.
What changed in the last 24 months
A handful of things shifted that, on their own, wouldn’t have moved much. Stacked, they made per-second creator payments possible for the first time.
- Payments got cheaper. Sub-cent transactions are now economic on the right infrastructure. They weren’t, even three years ago.
- The chains matured. What was novel a few years back is now stable enough to settle real revenue on. The plumbing exists.
- Creators are leaving rented land. The era of building an audience on someone else’s algorithm and hoping the rules don’t change is closing. People are moving to infrastructure they own.
- Media is having a rebirth. Video is the format AI consumes on behalf of humans. The audience is growing. The dollars in motion are growing. None of it currently routes to rights.
JubJub is the part that routes it.
Payment that runs while the work runs
When someone watches a video on JubJub, fractions of a cent move from the viewer to the rights holders every second the video is playing. There’s no settlement schedule. There’s no platform sitting on the money. The payment is the watch.
That’s the whole pitch. The mechanism behind it is technical, and the developer docs go deeper. The thing to take away here is that the gap between “audience watches” and “creator gets paid” has been closed to roughly zero.
02What we stand forWhat JubJub stands for.
Creators have been paying for the privilege of being paid
Every system between the audience and the creator takes a cut for the work of holding the money. The cut is the price of the delay. The delay is the price of the architecture. The architecture exists because someone, somewhere, needed to be the bank.
JubJub’s argument is that nobody needs to be the bank anymore. The contract is the bank. The payment routes itself. The 3% JubJub takes covers the cost of running the infrastructure, not the cost of being trusted to hold the money. That distinction is small in words and large in consequence.
Nobody needs to be the bank anymore. The contract is the bank.
What JubJub is not
Subscription replacement that needs you to convert your audience. No one has to sign up. No one has to subscribe. The viewer watches; the payment moves. The friction of conversion is gone.
Crypto play. Viewers can pay through normal means. The contract handles what happens underneath. The wallet matters because that’s where the payment lands, not because using JubJub means thinking about crypto.
Discount platform. JubJub is not “YouTube but cheaper.” The architecture is different in kind, not in degree. The 3% is a consequence of the architecture, not the headline.
Why per-second
Per-view payments are a step forward. Per-second is the right unit. A viewer who watches thirty seconds of a forty-minute piece has consumed thirty seconds of the work; the creator should receive thirty seconds of payment. Per-view averages would obscure that. Per-second keeps the payment honest to the watch.
The technical detail of how the per-second mechanic works belongs in the developer docs and the FAQ. What matters here is that the unit matches the reality.
The 3% question, because someone will ask
JubJub takes 3% of payment transactions. YouTube takes roughly 45%. Spotify takes around 30% before the distributor takes its own cut. The comparison is the whole argument.
What you lose by waiting
The audience watching the work right now is paying somebody. If that somebody isn’t routing the payment to the rights holders, the value is being absorbed by the intermediary. Every month spent on the old infrastructure is a month of paid attention that didn’t reach the people who made the work. Nobody refunds those months.
Per-second payment isn’t a future thing. It’s a present thing the existing platforms haven’t built, because their business model depends on the delay.
03How it worksHow payments move through JubJub.
What happens when an audience watches
Six steps, in the order they actually happen.
The order matters. Ownership is registered first, then the work is distributed, then payment routes against the existing record. The record is the thing the payment knows where to send to. For how the rights claim under the payment gets registered, see the ownership pillar.
Splits, settled by contract
When a piece of work has more than one rights holder, the same per-second payment routes to all of them at the same time. The split percentages are set at the publish moment, baked into the ownership tokens, and enforced by the contract. There is no admin layer that reconciles afterwards. There is no editor waiting two months for their share to land.
Paywall any video player
JubJub ships an SDK that turns any video player into a JubJub player. A creator can embed it on a personal site, a Substack, a Patreon, a portfolio, anywhere they ship video. The payment routes the same way it would on jubjubapp.com. No subscription required. No need to convert the audience to a new platform. The audience watches in the place they were already watching, and the creator gets paid.
Brand deals (coming next)
Brand deal payment isn’t live yet, but the shape is built. When a brand and a creator agree on a deliverable, the payment sits ready. When the media is accepted and goes out to socials, the payment subtracts and both parties receive a receipt and an invoice. The delivery confirms the payment. No follow-up emails. No thirty-day wait.
What the audience needs to do
Nothing unusual. Viewers can pay through normal payment methods. The wallet machinery is in the background. From the audience side, JubJub looks like watching a video and being charged for what they watched. The complexity sits inside the contracts, not inside the viewer experience.
What stays off-chain
The only thing JubJub puts on-chain is the rights claim and the payment routing. Everything else stays off, by design.
Off-chain by default
- The media file lives in storage.
- The viewer’s identity isn’t recorded.
- The watch history isn’t published.
- Anything not strictly required for the payment to route is left where it belongs.
The chain knows the work is being watched and where the payment goes. It doesn’t need to know anything else.
04Four ways money movesFour ways money moves through JubJub.
The pillar above is the category. The four sub-pillars below are where the category becomes specific.
Payment that runs with the watch.
Fractions of a cent move from the viewer’s wallet to the rights holders every second the work is playing. Three USDC transfers per settlement: viewer to router to token holders. The audience watches; the payment moves; the creator’s wallet ticks up. There is no payout schedule because there is no need for one.
How streaming payments workSplits that pay themselves.
Take a sketch comedy channel: host, writer, editor, camera op. Set the team up as a workspace with allocation splits, say 40/25/20/15. When the video publishes, four tokens mint to four wallets in those proportions. Every payment that video earns afterwards routes to all four wallets at once. No reconciliation, no accountant, no trust required.
How to split revenue automaticallyAny player, payment included.
The SDK lets a creator turn any player they ship into a JubJub player. Embed on a blog, a Substack, a Patreon, a portfolio, a brand microsite. The payment routes the same as it would on jubjubapp.com. No subscription. No conversion. The audience watches in the place they were already watching.
How to turn any player into a paywallBrand deals without the follow-up.
When the deliverable lands and the media goes out, the payment subtracts and both parties get a receipt and an invoice. The delivery confirms the payment. No second invoice. No third follow-up. The mechanism that releases the payment is the same mechanism that proves the work shipped.
How brand deal payments work
05Why this is realWhy this is real.
Live on Base
The streaming payment stack is running on Base. Token issuance, the payment router, the per-second settlement, the SDK that turns any player into a JubJub player, the splits to multiple wallets, all live and verifiable on-chain. Brand deal payments come next.
- Token issuance. Ownership mints at the publish moment.
- Payment router. The contract that hands payment to token holders.
- Per-second settlement. Mux session heartbeat, six-second segments.
- The SDK. Any video player becomes a JubJub player.
- Splits to multiple wallets. Settled by the contract at every payment event.
- Verifiable on-chain. Every transfer is on Basescan.
