The 7 Billion Dollar Affiliate Industry Has A New Disruptive Technology To Deal With.
RefToken, a digital platform designed to enhance affiliate marketing, is launching a new currency for its network. Known as Ref Tokens, this currency will facilitate more efficient payments between merchants and publishers while giving them an incentive to use the platform responsibly.
RefToken has arisen as an alternative to the traditional method of organizing affiliate marketing, which is highly costly and carries a number of serious risks. Instead of hiring intermediaries, merchants and publishers can find and vet each other on the RefToken platform, which uses an immutable blockchain to display key information on each party. This allows both to be confident that the data they have on one another is accurate and that they can count on each other for good work and honest payments.
Creating a new currency will aid RefToken’s efforts to enhance modern marketing. Merchants will have to purchase this currency before beginning new projects with publishers, ensuring that they have enough money to pay their affiliates. Combined with changing the incentive structure, this will make affiliate marketing both safer and more efficient.
RefToken & the Challenges of Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is one of the most effective modern methods for publishers to make money and for merchants to appeal to targeted audiences. It occurs when publishers use print ads, marketing content, video spots, and other forms of publicity to draw attention to the merchant’s products. In exchange, merchants agree to pay publishers for every new customer that they bring in.
While this arrangement looks great on paper, it creates a number of practical problems, including:
Company Mismatching- Merchants can’t afford to work with just any affiliates. They need to find publishers whose specific readers or viewers are likely to buy their products. Likewise, publishers can’t promote products unless they know that they are relevant to their followers. Both parties need to have detailed information on each other’s specialties and skills before they work together.
Deceptive Information- Not all publishers have a strong track record of creating quality writings and videos; if merchants work with them, they could end up paying for ineffective marketing campaigns. Similarly, publishers need to know that the merchants they work with sell safe, functional products, lest they tie their publications to useless or dangerous items. Both parties thus need accurate information on each other’s track records.
Payment Disputes- Whether through malice or misunderstanding, merchants and publishers often disagree about how many customers they’ve attracted and how much money the former party owes the latter. They need someone who can interpret contracts and conversion data impartially and determine the sum owed.
Traditionally, publishers and merchants have relied on intermediaries to resolve these issues. An intermediary can investigate another company, consider its track record, and make sure it is holding up its contractual obligations. But intermediaries often take a long time to do this while charging a hefty fee, adding significantly to the cost and difficulty of the affiliate marketing process. Intermediaries are also not entirely impartial; for a variety of different reasons, they may be biased toward one party or disregard the interests of both.
As a digital platform designed to connect publishers and merchants, RefToken eliminates intermediaries from the affiliate marketing process. Instead, it relies on blockchain technology to store information about each company on its network, which no one can modify or falsify. It also creates smart contracts, or contracts that are programmed to enforce themselves automatically. This means that rather than fight over how many new customers have been attracted and how much money is owed, publishers and merchants can count on the platform to automatically detect conversions and deliver the appropriate payments instantaneously.
