Photo Credit: Disctopia
Disctopia was granted a US patent covering its ability to tie creator payouts to verified listening across music, podcasts, audiobooks, and video.
Streaming fraud continues to plague artists trying to make their fair share of the payout pool, and it’s getting even worse as artificial intelligence improves. But creator monetization platform Disctopia hopes to change that with a new U.S. patent covering technology that measures whether audiences are actually present and engaged and connects that engagement to a creator’s earnings.
For the past two decades, streaming has built its payout model around the concept of the “play,” which is counted when someone clicks on a song, podcast, or video. But whether that’s tied to a real user who engaged with that media or a bot farming clicks can be difficult to ascertain.
Disctopia’s patent covers technology for analyzing content engagement, measuring audience presence, and connecting verified engagement to creator compensation.
“The internet learned how to monetize the click. We built a system around what happens after the click,” said Patrick Hill, founder and CEO of Disctopia. “A play tells you somebody started something. It does not tell you they cared. It does not tell you they stayed. And it definitely should not automatically tell you what a creator is worth.”
The company uses the example of two creators, both of whom generate 10,000 plays. The first holds its audience through nearly the entire program, but the second loses most of it within the opening minutes. On a traditional monetization dashboard, both enter an ad conversation with the same number, but their audience’s value differs to an advertiser. Disctopia argues that their economic value should not automatically be treated as the same.
Inventory inflated by “clickbait,” or by content looped on a rack of devices, is not competing on the same level as inventory that has “real people behind it.” That means that while fraud can manufacture a play count, it cannot manufacture an audience that loves a creator.
So what does that change for creator payouts? The patent covers technology that ensures that every payment is transferred to the content owners as a share determined by the verified presence metric. A song with 800 listeners who play the entire song can be worth more than one with 30,000 who leave in the opening seconds, and now, creators can be paid accordingly.
Specifically, the technology measures presence during a stream rather than assuming that starting content equals consuming it and evaluates activity during streaming to build a presence metric as consumption continues. The technology can generate content-aware prompts, evaluate audience responses, and develop an engagement score from those interactions.
Under the hood, speech recognition converts audio into text and identifies keywords, so the system knows what is being consumed rather than treating every file as an anonymous stream. That can be particularly valuable in the case of podcasts, episodes of which can be downloaded to a device automatically without anyone having consumed them.
“Attention should be worth something,” said Hill. “And creators should not have to compete against inflated numbers to prove their value.”
Disctopia prides itself on being a creator-first streaming and distribution platform for independent creators, media companies, and brands. The platform unites podcasts, music, audiobooks, and video in one ecosystem, with hosting, distribution, monetization, analytics, and audience engagement tools in one dashboard. The company has notably supported video podcasts since 2022.