READ.CASH Affiliate Scheme: Shill Incentive Galore

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Avatar for sploit
Written by
4 years ago

A platoon of shills

About a month ago, READ.CASH introduced their Affiliate Program. They chose for a setup where all links to articles you share become de facto affiliate links. Every user who signs up to the platform through your affiliate link, and starts spending on upvotes or starts earning by publishing articles will earn you money.

I'm convinced this is a very powerful scheme, essentially motivating every READ.CASH user to become an active shill for the platform. I feel the chosen strategy, using the sites content to pull in new users is a solid one. It's already a common practice to share content on the internet, so it only makes sense to use that behaviour to motivate shilling the platform.

But, I think we can take it one step further. Right now you only get rewarded when users sign up through your shared affiliate link. What if we also reward affiliates on every upvote an article receives through their affiliate link? By users already singed up to the platform.

An army of shills

Additionally rewarding affiliates for every financial action solicited through their affiliate links would give a great boost to massively distribute read.cash content on the internet and pull in fresh users. Effectively building an army of marketeers, without hiring a single one.

This would also be a great incentive to have users create curated article lists and have the moderators paid for their efforts. Effectively building an army of moderators without hiring a single one.

Let content creators choose what percentage of their earnings they want to spend on affiliates. This way content creators have a tool to entice shills to make more effort on shilling their content. Creating some sort of market place for promotion.

I can easily see building bots to spread the content on other platforms become a lucrative business. This sounds like an epic win for READ.CASH and its content creators to me.

I'm sure we can come up with more lucrative schemes that are a win-win-win situation for content creators, the platform and its shills. I would love to see your ideas in the comments.

Weapons of mass adoption

  • Affiliate links to get new users to sign up

  • Affiliate links to spread content far and wide

  • Curated article lists populated with affiliate links paying the moderator

In the Bitcoin Cash ecosystem we haven't yet harnessed the full potential of affiliate schemes. READ.CASH is making a great effort here and is a prime example to imitate in that regard.

We're building a new non-custodial financial system, we should harness the powers it bestows upon on us and let it do the work for us. This is an easy one.

Soldier on!

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$ 0.31 from @Koush
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Avatar for sploit
Written by
4 years ago

Comments

Near the end: "harassed" ... maybe you meant "harnessed".

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User's avatar Big-Bubbler
4 years ago

Yes, indeed. Thanks!

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User's avatar sploit
4 years ago

"What if we also reward affiliates on every upvote an article receives through their affiliate link? By users already singed up to the platform."

I actually thought it works that way already. I think it'd be worthwile testing it out.

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User's avatar Koush
4 years ago

Wait, it does work like that.

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User's avatar Read.Cash
4 years ago

Wait, either I'm missing something or I'm not making myself clear. See my reply to your other comment ;)

https://read.cash/@sploit/readcash-affiliate-scheme-shill-incentive-galore-cf731b57#comment-0ec01e7b

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User's avatar sploit
4 years ago

What if we also reward affiliates on every upvote an article receives through their affiliate link?

It does work like that. You get 3% of the total amount if the user that signed up upvotes somebody, being upvoted by somebody, gets a sponsors, sponsors somebody. Each of these actions get you 3% (or actually 30% of our profit, which is 10% of the total amount).

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User's avatar Read.Cash
4 years ago

What I mean is: If a user is already a member, but follows an affiliate link and then upvotes the article. The affiliate reward then goes to the user that signed him up, it should additionally give an affiliate reward to the user that brought him to the article.

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User's avatar sploit
4 years ago

it should additionally give an affiliate reward to the user that brought him to the article.

It doesn't really make sense. Affiliate program rewards people bringing in the new users. People help us grow the platform - we reward it with money. Why should we reward bringing current users to the site?

The second problem is that we're already giving away 60% of our profit to affiliates. We can't give away 60% more. That would be 120%.

$ 0.05
User's avatar Read.Cash
4 years ago

The idea is to not only attract new users (although obviously your main motivator), but also to spread your content far and wide, and keep users coming back. I wouldn't mind the reward to be lower, there's volume in numbers.

I myself don't browse this site often, I land on articles others share through twitter and reddit. I think it would be a good idea to keep on motivating the behaviour of sharing content.

Anyway, you're selling yourself short if that is your only intention for the affiliate scheme. You want users to come back and spend.

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User's avatar sploit
4 years ago

IDK, the affiliate program is working and people are spreading the content far and wide in the hopes that new people would sign up: https://i.imgur.com/xG1wRo4.png this is the chart of affiliate links generated.

We technically can't give away smaller reward, because of the dust limit. 3% of $0.05 upvote is the smallest amount we can send on Bitcoin Cash network - we can't send 2% or 1% of that. We can't even send 3% of $0.03 upvote to an affiliate - that's below the dust limit.

Also, please mind that read.cash is not profitable, the profits won't even pay for server and domain, not to mention the developers time. It costs us every day to run it. We can of course give away 100% of revenue to people for doing nothing, but that would mean that we would have to close read.cash.

$ 0.10
User's avatar Read.Cash
4 years ago

Oh, I believe you it is working great, I just think it can be even better. I completely follow you if you feel your system is good enough as it is. Then just keep this idea in the back of your head for future iterations, is all I'm asking.

The dust limit is real, I feel you. But, I would still keep affiliate rewards at 1 or 1.5% and only pay out when the reward is > 546 sats. In the future you could also look into tokens to pay affiliate rewards (not sure if this will work for your usecase though, but worth looking into imho).

On profits, lower affiliate reward and raise your profit margin. But extend the affiliate program to cover more ground as explained in the article. This should bring in more revenue and raise your total profit.

I don't agree that paying affiliates is rewarding them for doing nothing. They are effectively selling you their influence by promoting your platform to their network. You give them the opportunity to monetize their network while you still profit. I would assume that is very valuable resource for you guys.

Have you guys done some projections on how much users and activity you need to turn a profit?

Edit: Oh shit, you're right. You are paying them to do nothing. Don't give them passive income. I would scratch the sign up affiliate reward. Only pay them to solicit upvotes. That's their job. It's your job to entice the user to sign up and stay. It only makes sense :)

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User's avatar sploit
4 years ago

Here's something even cooler. The affiliate program is totally non-custodial too :) When you press an upvote button with an affiliate behind the scenes - you are actually creating a fan-out transaction to 3-4 people at once: the author, 1-2 affiliates and read.cash.

After your browser sent this transaction, your browser voluntarily notifies read.cash about this and we verify that the transaction was according to the rules. If it was - we'll update the interface to reflect that fact, otherwise you've donated something to someone - great, but we're not interested to show that fact.

That creates incentives to play by the rules, despite us never touching user's money :)

$ 0.06
User's avatar Read.Cash
4 years ago

Yeah, that's pretty cool. I noticed that when seeing txs coming in in electron cash. Have you guys looked into bip70 or bitpay json payment protocol, to have more control on enforcing the txs?

I'm curious what you think about the other ideas though, like rewarding affiliates for sending people to articles and curated lists?

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User's avatar sploit
4 years ago

Yes, we did implement BIP70, it's terrifyingly bad. Not the protocol itself, but the support of it. We've seen wallets hanging, crashing, quietly finishing up without any error message, oh the horrors :) And we couldn't even reach to many of the developers. So we abandoned it completely at least for a few years.

These are all great ideas. But we don't have enough time :) For now we're done with the affiliate program, but we are developing the "communities" idea and we're thinking about how to support the moderators, so we'll see about that. Too many ideas, not enough time :)

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User's avatar Read.Cash
4 years ago

That is indeed a valid grievance, ecosystem support for BIP70 is atrocious. Looking forward to seeing the communities fleshed out!

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User's avatar sploit
4 years ago

Looking forward to seeing the communities fleshed out!

We too 😂 It turned out way harder than we expected.

$ 0.05
User's avatar Read.Cash
4 years ago
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