SuperHi CEO Rik Lomas on ways to solve the case of broken creative ownership in the creator economy

What would you say are the biggest struggles (educational) creators face now?

RL: At the moment, there are really two ways to be a content creator. Either you take on all the risk yourself, like I did starting SuperHi, or you go and produce content for a company and they own your content outright.

The problem with this all-or-nothing choice is that in the first scenario, you will have to invest money from your own pocket. In reality this usually means that the creator has at least one other occupation next to creating content. Apart from the fact that you take on a huge personal risk (potentially losing your savings with no result), it can mean that as a creator you have less time and resources to focus on the content creation. This can impact the quality of your content which then impacts again most likely its success. In both cases, neither the student or creator benefits.

In the second scenario, we often see that companies charge large fees and the creator can’t make a sustainable income. Next to that, many platforms regularly release courses of similar topics, resulting in competition among the creators. For students, it can result in a paradox of choice. They simply choose the video with most views and miss out on the content that might be best for them.

The platform comes out as the biggest winner along with a hand full of creators that managed to beat the algorithm, but the majority of creators are left with results below their initial expectations.

How does SuperHi approach this situation?

RL: Throughout the last years we have been working heavily on how we can support creatives to make a living through the SuperHi platform and how we can offer our students more diverse and quality content. We’ve always been a progressive, and forward-thinking company – we were the first company to properly support a transparent basic income project.

To take that even further, we’re currently working on the largest change for SuperHi so far, called SuperHi Plus. We’re wanting to help up-and-coming, and established creators make the best content for the web and share it with a large, established community through our platform. We’ll be opening SuperHi up to allow new creators to post their content to the SuperHi community—something we’ve never done before.

The main difference between compared to other platforms, is that we’re fully leaning into the idea of collaboration over competition, through a new model that we’re calling co-ownership.

Okay, so what exactly does co-ownership mean for a content creator?

RL: Think of it similar to say a record label or a film producer. We want to see great, high-quality content out in the world so we’re going to be supporting content creators by reducing their exposure to risk and helping them with funding and guidance throughout a 12-week program.

For the creator, it’s completely free to sign up and they’ll be able to choose a level of funding, between $6,000 and $12,000. In return, we will take between 10–20% of revenue from the content they make from the program. For SuperHi, it’s in our interest to help make successful content as co-owners with the creators. Through this new model, we’re aligning incentives from all sides. It’s a win for creators, a win for viewers, and a win for SuperHi if we all collaborate to make great content.

What about all the current SuperHi members? Do they get to see this content?

RL: Yes! Through SuperHi Plus, we’re allowing creators to publish their content on the SuperHi platform, which all of our members will have access to. This also means we’ll be opening up the revenue we make on annual memberships. We are splitting it with creators in a transparent way, allowing them to gain instant access to a large creative community, eager to learn new skills.

Then, how do you make sure the revenue is split in a transparent way?

RL: We’re keeping the membership split simple – the minutes of your content watched as a percentage of everyone’s minutes watched is what percentage of the pot you receive every month.

If I’m a creator, will SuperHi Plus look like SuperHi-branded content?

RL: No, it won’t. The look and feel of the content is up to the creator, and we can help them with developing a brand style and tone of voice too. In fact, we’ve been rebuilding a lot of our technical infrastructure specifically to be less tied to SuperHi as a company. Our philosophy is to build an ecosystem of tools that can outlive SuperHi and be interoperable. We’re committed to building the best creator-focused tools on the internet, even if it means those tools outlive SuperHi.

How does that work though? How do you even make technology that’s not tied to a company?

RL: Lots of things are not tied to a particular company! For example, take a JPG file. That isn’t tied to a particular company but you can use tools like Photoshop or Figma to export and import JPGs without being specifically tied to Adobe. Similarly, I can listen to MP3s on any program that supports them.

We’re building out a standardized model for content that allows creators flexibility of the content that they own. If a creator wants to put their content on their own website and have a SuperHi member login to view that content, that will be possible. They won’t need to be tied to the SuperHi site to watch content.

Our goal here is to make the best tools that support a standardized format. So it that guarantees creators’ content would continue to exist, should I get hit by a bus tomorrow and the SuperHi site were to disappear.

I hear about decentralization a lot when people talk about ‘web3’ but isn’t that just for things like NFTs?

RL: Ha, yeh I mean let’s assume that someone really hates what NFTs are right now… like they hate the idea of crappy art being traded for ridiculous costs… there is some interesting technology that’s below the surface level which allows the owner of that crappy art to sell and buy it on any platform that supports NFTs. I can buy an NFT on Opensea and then sell it on Zora or Foundation because they all support the tech under the hood. We’re using the same technology to allow creators and viewers to have that similar control of the things that produce and consume.

It also means that it holds platforms to a higher ethical standard. If I find out that one of the platforms is doing something I disagree with, I’m not tied to it. I can go elsewhere very easily and the data is mine, not theirs.

We’re holding ourselves to similarly high ethical standards of allowing creators to use what tools they want, rather than being tied to the first platform they use. Plus, the community that a creator builds, remains their own and doesn’t belong to the platform. It’s a good thing for creators and viewers alike.