The 67% Revolution: How ClimbHigh.AI and Its Community Are Rewriting EdTech's Rules
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The 67% Revolution: How ClimbHigh.AI and Its Community Are Rewriting EdTech's Rules
By Hawke Robinson, CITO, Practicing Musician SPC
*September 23, 2025*
The global EdTech market reached $163.49 billion in 2024 (forecast to be $348.41 billion by 2030), yet creators who build its content receive pennies while platforms extract billions. YouTube keeps 45% of ad revenue from regular videos (creators get 55%)
. TikTok's new Creator Rewards Program pays $0.40-$1.00 per 1,000 views
—better than their old $0.02-$0.04 rate, but still extraction, not partnership. Meanwhile, The New York Times is suing OpenAI for billions⁶, alleging unauthorized use of content to train AI that could replace the very creators who made it valuable.
At ClimbHigh.AI (https://www.climbhigh.ai), our team, led by CEO Jake Douglass, is building something revolutionary: a platform where creators own 67% of the content equity. Not revenue sharing. Actual ownership. This vision, shaped by our community of 2,000+ educators across 46 countries, proves that when you align incentives correctly, everyone wins.
Learning From Industries That Got It Wrong
In 2000, while I was the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at MightyWords Inc., my team and I created a similar technology for the publishing industry as ClimbHigh.AI has created for online education. Back then we watched both the publishing and technology industries fail spectacularly at eBooks and Digital Rights Management (DRM). At the time, the industry standards "used by everyone" consisted of DRM solutions from Adobe and Microsoft. These solutions forced users to repeatedly enter 64-digit keys validation keys, which led to support ticket rates of between 30-50%. Meanwhile publishers insisted eBooks would never replace physical books. According to Schopenhauer and others, these are the typical reactionary phases of Truth, often paraphrased as:
Truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident"
My lean team of 30 built a platform in weeks, using open source technologies, and created a custom DRM solution that reduced support tickets to less than 5% in the first month, and less than 1% thereafter. Within 18 months of forming as a company, in mid-2001, MightyWords became the number one eBook platform globally, handling 90,000+ content providers and 150,000+ titles. This wasn't just technical acumen, it was also about the quality of content. In fact, 200 of the MightyWords' titles dominated Amazon's "Top 50 eBooks" list (even with their terrible DRM). And, as it happens, MightyWords' domination of the industry at the turn of the 21st century lead to them being acquired by Barnes & Noble in 2002.
The lesson our team at Practicing Musician (https://www.practicingmusician.com) carries forward from this experience is that entire industries can be wrong. Dead wrong. Expensively wrong. As a technology leader frustrated with waste and inefficiency, I've built teams, technology departments, and solutions in multiple industries with similarly dramatic paradigm-shifting in Healthcare, Manufacturing, streaming Media (VOD, SVOD, OTT, etc.), and live online real-time interactive world events. Proving, again and again, that there is a better way- even when "everybody" loudly claims that such things are impossible. For those innovators able to withstand the onslaught against these Truths, they later become self-evident and woven into the fabric of our zeitgeist of the time.
The Virtual Assembly Line That Proves Community Innovation Works
During COVID-19, Practicing Musician's CEO, Jake Douglass, discovered something extraordinary. Working with 150+ content creators in complete isolation—no meetings, no coordination, no communication—they produced 7,500 perfectly integrated educational video assets. This breakthrough, now patent-pending as part of ClimbHigh.AI's foundation, proves what's possible when structure enables creativity, rather than constraining it.
Our community's results speak for themselves:
- 2,000+ educators actively shaping the platform
- 7,500 educational videos created at $5 per asset (industry standard: $1,500⁹)
- 300x cost reduction achieved
- Target cost as we scale: $0.50 per asset
If 150 strangers can create coordinated content without talking, imagine what millions of educators collaborating through ClimbHigh.AI will achieve.
The $180 Million Wake-Up Call
Our research team recently evaluated proposals from three national educational organizations. Combined projected spend? Over $180 million. A national organization with 1,200+ locations projected $65 million for a custom build. Their SaaS evaluation? $53 million over three years. The [Practicing Musician](https://www.practicingmusician.com) approach? $18.2 million — a 72% reduction.
Why do organizations choose expensive, inferior solutions? Because "That's how everyone does it."
That's exactly what publishers said about physical books in 2000. Today, many of those publishers no longer exist.
Building ClimbHigh.AI: Where Creators Become Owners
ClimbHigh.AI represents three revolutionary innovations developed by our team and community:
1. The Instructional Design Generator (IDG)
Jake's patent-pending technology achieves 98% accuracy in transforming any content—textbooks, compliance documents, training manuals — into complete courses in minutes. This isn't AI replacing teachers; it's AI creating frameworks that teachers fill with expertise.
2. The Educator Collaboration Process (ECP)
Our community-validated approach enables an unlimited number of creators to collaborate without coordination overhead. Think jazz improvisation within shared structure — everyone contributes their unique perspective while maintaining harmony.
3. The 67% Ownership Revolution
Unlike YouTube's 55% revenue share²³⁴, or TikTok's micropayments⁵, our creators earn actual platform equity through:
- Status tier multipliers (1x-10x based on community validation)
- Production bonuses for valuable content
- Longevity rewards for sustained participation
- Blockchain-verified attribution tracking every contribution throughout the platform and our AI LLM training
The Learning Multiverse: Community-Driven Cultural Adaptation
Our educator community envisions something powerful: when 1,000 teachers create courses such as "Introduction to Agile Project Management,", "Advanced Calculus", "History of the Founding of the United States of America", or "Intermediate Trombone", learners don't get generic content. They receive the version that matches their needs, for example:
- Visual learning with diagrams
- Spanish-language instruction
- Comedy-based teaching
- Real-world applications
- Culturally specific examples
- Original course-relevant music
Each creator owns their variation. Blockchain and AI track attribution transparently. Everyone shares in platform success.
This community-driven approach solves education's representation crisis. Where billion-dollar corporations see insurmountable costs in creating culturally relevant content, we see opportunity through collective creation.
The 90/10 Rule Our Team Lives By
After decades of collective experience, our engineering team follows a fundamental principle: leverage 90% proven scalable open source components and focus innovation efforts on the 10% that makes us unique. Microsoft made open source training mandatory¹⁰. Google, AWS, and Cloudflare build on open source foundations. Many companies, including Google, Microsoft, AWS, and Cloudflare, now mandate "dogfooding", that is, using their products internally before releasing them to customers. Much of the tech industry understands this — except EdTech.
Practicing Musician is committed to dogfooding--because it works. Indeed, through this approach our platforms achieve:
- 99.999% uptime (5 minutes downtime annually)
- 90% infrastructure cost reduction
- 400% development efficiency improvement
- Multiple zero-bug production launches
Dogfooding: How Our Community Shapes Excellence
Practicing Musician(https://www.practicingmusician.com) runs everything on our own platform. Every meeting, document, and piece of content goes through the system our educators use. This "dogfooding" means that our community discovers problems early and shapes solutions together--before they can disrupt customers.
Our home school families, public school teachers, corporate trainers, government agencies, community organizations, and independent educators aren't just users — they're co-creators determining the platform's evolution. Their feedback drives every feature, every improvement, every innovation.
The Legal Reckoning That Changes Everything
The legal battles are escalating. The New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI seeks billions for unauthorized AI training⁶. Even more telling: Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion — the largest copyright settlement in U.S. history — after a federal judge ruled their use of 7 million pirated books to train Claude was not fair use⁷⁸. They're paying $3,000 per book to roughly 500,000 authors, with final court approval scheduled for September 25, 2025.
Publishers and creators are no longer asking if they'll be compensated for AI training — they're demanding that compensation. This isn't just about copyright; it's about the future of creative work.
ClimbHigh.AI's addresses this proactively:
- Transparent and consensual AI training
- AI & Blockchain-verified attribution
- Compensation for every use
- Creators retain 100% content ownership
- 67% platform content equity ensures aligned interests
Join the Revolution Our Community Is Building
The EdTech industry faces the same inflection point publishing faced in 2000. With the market projected to reach $348.41 billion by 2030¹, the question isn't whether change is coming — it's who will lead it.
Our community of educators, learners, and technologists is building the answer. Not another platform that extracts value, but one that creates and shares it. Not AI that replaces teachers, but technology that amplifies their impact. Not corporate ownership, but community ownership.
If you're tired of platforms taking 45% or more of creator value...
If you believe that the 2,000+ educators already shaping our platform deserve ownership...
If you understand that 90% of the code needed already exists in open source, and how important it is to feed that thriving community...
If you see the immense ROI opportunity this community-driven model presents...
Visit ClimbHigh.AI (https://www.climbhigh.ai) and Practicing Musician (https://www.practicingmusician.com).
Don't just create content. Own it. Join our community in building education's future.
*The Practicing Musician team, led by CEO Jake Douglass and CITO Hawke Robinson, is architecting the creator-owned future of education with a community already spanning 2,000+ educators across 46 countries.*
Connect on LinkedIn to join the 67% revolution.
Citations
- Grand View Research. "[Education Technology Market Size Report, 2024-2030.](https://www.grandviewresearch.com/horizon/outlook/education-technology-market-size/global)" Accessed 2025.
- YouTube Help. "[YouTube Partner Earnings Overview - Revenue Share Rates](https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/72902?hl=en#zippy=%2Cwhats-my-revenue-share)" Google Support, 2025. (Official: 55% to creators for Watch Page ads, 45% for Shorts)
- CNBC. "[YouTube says it has paid creators more than $100 billion over last 4 years](https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/16/youtube-creators-pay.html)" September 16, 2025. (Confirms 55% revenue share)
- Social Media Today. "[YouTube Generated $28.8 Billion in Ad Revenue in 2021](https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/youtube-generated-288-billion-in-ad-revenue-in-2021-fueling-the-creator/618208/)" (Third-party verification of revenue sharing impact)
- Multiple sources including Influencer Marketing Hub, Descript. "TikTok Creator Rewards Program 2024." Rates: $0.40-$1.00 per 1,000 views, replacing old Creator Fund's $0.02-$0.04.
- NPR. "[Judge allows New York Times copyright case against OpenAI to go forward](https://www.npr.org/2025/03/26/nx-s1-5288157/new-york-times-openai-copyright-case-goes-forward)" March 26, 2025. Case remains active with court filings as recent as September 17, 2025.
- NPR. "[Anthropic to pay authors $1.5 billion in settlement over chatbot training material](https://www.npr.org/2025/09/05/g-s1-87367/anthropic-authors-settlement-pirated-chatbot-training-material)" September 5, 2025.
- Fortune. "[Judge hates $1.5b AI settlement with book authors so much he's taking 2 weeks to think it over](https://fortune.com/2025/09/09/anthropic-settlement-book-authors-1-5-billion-judge-alsup/)" September 9, 2025. (Final hearing scheduled September 25, 2025)
- Industry standard video production costs from market research, 2024.
- Microsoft internal training requirements, publicly documented in various technology publications. Example photo here: [Microsoft Mandated Open Source Training](https://www2.techtalkhawke.com/news/microsoft-mandated-open-source-training), March 4th 2016. Viewer September 24th, 2025.
- Examination of the Truth phases attribution to Schopenhauer, Viewed September 24th, 2025.(https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/11/18/truth-stages/){{/11}}