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RE: Splinterlands Ambassador Program Announcement
The part that could change is the 10% part for the stores... they're used to much higher commissions for doing sales/marketing.
To me it seems like he's saying the people he's trying to get to do the work are the stores and ambassadors are more like middle-men that are making connections... maybe relaying some of the information.
Perhaps if the ambassador is doing a lot more work than expected they should talk to the store about the split. And that's why the portion to the store could be a bit higher.
But then there should be more strict rules for those that have the store/market tag so they don't abbuse pack buys and hurt the market. We all know users buy using an affiliate code to get the 5% off.
A shop owner isn't going to agree to split his sales revenue while also advertising an unknown game. Plus what sales person wants to negotiate a side deal that is no way enforceable with a shop owner.
What's the pitch going to be....
I just don't see that working unless the sales person is friends with the shop owner.
Lets take the above business model as an example. These type of places are usually like mom and pop shops. They give out low value (usd value) stuff for XXX tickets. I would bet a dollar to a doughnut that a percentage of them would be happy to advertise Splinterlands for "free" if simply given some StarterSet codes that they could hand out to their paying customers who are redeeming prize tickets in their shop.
This would cut the shop rev share to 0%. Then give that 10% to the affiliate or "ambassador". Top ambassadors should be able to attian some Starter Set codes for free while the lower tier should need to pay for batches at deep discount prices.
Its likely the bulk of the StarterSet codes go unused (which is the reason why they need to be deeply discounted).
How does Splinterlands make money from my suggested model, simple, they gain players who spend on their site. They gain more attention from those who do affiliate work as 15% is starting to reach the point in which its worth it to put the work in. Personally when I did affiliate work in the past you would be hard pressed to get me to look at anything that paid under 20% commission.
Thanks for the response @jarvie and you make a good point that 10% rev share for shops isn't likely going to be very appealing to them. It will be interesting to see if anyone has any success with this outside of someone who is both the shop owner and ambassador.
Well if 15% or 20% is the amount to deal with then maybe something could be done to give less to shop and more to you from Splinterlands side of things. Maybe they could do something on the back-end side of splinterlands code.
However the worry i would have is abuse of that commission of pack sales like we see as the default go to for users buying their own packs.
Also the idea to have cards that have a starter code on it that is immediately tied to an ambassador is very interesting. Maybe the ambassador could pay to cover the cost of the printing of those cards or something and sign an agreement that those codes won't be abused.
Heck this is even better. Make a sarter pack card where you have to scratch to see the code.
Put a $10 price on the card. But allow the SHOP to sell the card for whatever they want I suppose.
I am more speaking on the whole model, not just what it would take for myself to get envolved. As I noted, I could be very wrong and 5% might be enough to get just enough people motiviated. Some seem to be happy with it as apparent in this topic and in discord chat.
From my own personal experience with online affiliate marketing in which I'm sure many on this blockchain have experience with, when I first started looking in affiliate commisions for crypto related stuff the small commisions rates for affilliates was rather shocking to me and I gave up on the idea almost instantly.
The best crypto affiliate deal I found was for a then start up exchange that offered a tiered commision starting at 0% all the way up to *50% commisions for "super affiliates". Seeing this I put massive amount of hours in for weeks on end with finding sign ups all across the web. I ended up with a few hundered sign ups under my affiliate link and I wasn't even in the top 10% of affiliates this exchange managed to attract. That's the type of advantages and power having a decent affiliate site and tiered affiliated payment system brings. It gets the attention of those who do affiliate work on a more serious level vs. those who are happy with getting a little something extra.
That will always take place under any affiliate system. The site actually loses the same amount of funds regardless fo who gets the 15% commision so while your point should be taken into consideration when creating an affiliate program it shouldn't be THE deciding factor on commision rates.
But to touch on your concern a little, there are ways to deter abuse. The affiliate system can be partly centeralized while still keeping the game decentralized. Meaning, affliliates caught abusing the system can have their affiliate status removed and be demoted to the refer a friend rate of 5% thats currently advertised to the public. An affiliate site can be created to moderate affiliates and have advertisment goods and stats at our disposal such as banners / thumbnails / clicks / clich through percentages for our different marketing campaigns.
Excellent, adding some fun to the reveal of the starter code, I like it.
It's not just about the fun of scratching ... it's about protecting the starter codes that could be on cards that sit there at a shelf at a store.
Also I'm fine with (and so should the splinterlands team be fine with) the site (aka splinterlands.com) being out the 15%+ from commissions. The worry is the market taking the hit for the 15%.
Prices of individual cards are very very closely related to things like the 500 pack bulk discount the 5% comission and the 30% DEC-exchange discount.
If you add higher commissions i think it could be very easy for those to impact the prices of all the cards. How to stop a buyer from also being the seller? Almost impossible in this sort of environment. For example I have bought some packs (mostly i buy individual cards from the market) that makes me both a buyer and a seller (because of peakmonsters)
Also if you are the one doing the work to get the people sold then yeah you should be getting a better rate that 5% ... however i think the ambassador program you're more introducing venues that will be doing the sales and that's why the 5%.
Basically the sad news is that it would be incredibly hard to increase commission without it decreasing the value of the cards by that exact same amount. They'd have to work really hard to close the loopholes or work with really trusted partners ... and from what it sounds like is they want to pretty much just shotgun approach and work with anyone and everyone.
Sure that was understood, something would need to protect the code.
There's already higher commision rates (its possible to get a 15% rebate at this very moment. I would suggest putting a cap on the max rate someone can get so abuse isn't rampit. For example if an affiliate were to reach the max 15% commision then they wouldn't be able to claim the market commision if they started a market. This would mean the max rev share anyone could get is 15% but there would be multiple ways to reach that 15%.
DEC price shouldn't affect rev share decisions for paying those who are working hard to spread the word of the game. The Devs decided to accept DEC at $1/1000, currently that is working in the players favor as DEC can be attained for cheap but we shouldn't penalize affiliates for that.
You can't stop a buyer from being the seller. Affiliate programs have been abused like above for years. Its one of the flaws of the design. Anyone who creates an affiliate program mostly has to just accept that. There have been some sites that will ban you from being an affiliate with them if you sign up under your own link but I know that won't go over well with Splinterlands.
Putting a cap on the commision that is attainable from any single account will protect the game from abuse. In short, No stacking commissions, if someone plans on having secondary market and gets 10% rev share then they can only stack a 5% affiliate bonus on top of that as that would allow them to reach the max 15% rev share.
Affiliates abusing the system can have their rates cut back to 5%.
Also keep in mind this "ambassador" model requires travel to and from these different shops. That's time out of ones day and gas money (which could add up to allot). One would need allot of 5% commisions sales to just cover expenses.