Most people are probably familiar with affiliate links. They provide incentives for people to promote products and services from third parties. But most of the time creating an account for an affiliate service is a hassle and requires personal information.

With Monero it is possible to make this process fast, simple and combine it with financial privacy.

Accountless setup and ‘Monero accounts’

There are a couple of ways to setup an affiliate service based on Monero:

An accountless setup. Your public Monero address is part of the affiliate link. The service tracks purchases from the link and payments are send directly to your Monero address. The service can optionally provide a way to create short urls and QR codes. A ‘Monero account’ setup. The public Monero address is the username. To login you have to decipher a (random) code that is encrypted with the public key of the Monero address. Only people with access to the private key can decipher the code and get the access code. A regular username and password account setup. You link the account to one or more Monero addresses.

All methods allow affiliate marketeers to remain pseudo-anonymous and receive payments in Monero. This creates a pretty private and convenient way to make money with affiliate marketing.

Open vs restricted affiliate link generation

The accountless affiliate link generation method can be as simple as adding the Monero address to the end of a link. This will allow anyone to quickly create an affiliate link for a webshop or specific product on a webshop. This process can be automated with things like browser plugins which automatically insert or convert links to Monero affiliate links. This can be useful on a blog, forum or chat.

Setup 2 can also use the open affiliate link generation method to allow everyone to create affiliate links. But it can provide an extra management interface with options and statistics that is only accessible for those who have the private key.

Setup 2 and 3 can also be used to prevent ‘abuse’. A service could first check if someone actually has access to the private key before they can create an account or affiliate link. This will prevent a random person from using the Monero Dev fund address on the affiliate service.

But the openness can also be one of the benefits of Monero affiliate links. Anyone can use a Monero address from a third party, like the Monero Dev fund or a charity, so they will be the ones that receive the rewards.

Integrated addresses, sub-addresses and Openalias

Affiliate marketeers can use integrated addresses to do accounting on affiliate links. This can be useful when you want to have more detailed information about how each link is performing or when multiple people use a single Monero wallet. Sub-addresses can provide an extra level of unlinkablity between identities. Both types of addresses can be integrated in plugins or bots to save the user from having to enter them manually.

Monero addresses are quite long so perhaps Openalias can play a role in creating shorter and more user friendly urls.

Decentralized affiliate marketing on decentralized markets?

Any service can use a Monero affiliate setup. Webshops, service providers, etc. Perhaps decentralized markets like Open Bazaar and Bisq can also benefit from this.

Which brings us to the following open questions:

Is is possible to do affiliate marketing on a decentralized market?

Is is possible to do decentralized affiliate marketing for a centralized market?

Is it possible to do decentralized affiliate marketing for a decentralized market?

Perhaps decentralized markets can allow sellers to track affiliate links or use coupon codes to reward affiliate marketeers. A coupon code can be a Monero or openalias address.

Issues

Spoofing of Monero affiliate links

Monero transaction fees

Privacy of the person clicking on the affiliate link

Widespread use of Monero affiliate links

Implementations

There are issues, but if this is a feasible idea, then we would like to see it in action. It can help the adoption of Monero, protect the identity of the users and provide them financial privacy.

Think about the guy promoting bibles via affiliate links…

Anyway, we hope that some people see the value of this idea and will start working on it.

We don’t know if this idea is suitable for the Monero Forum Funding System. Perhaps it is a bit too much focused on marketing. If that is the case it can be developed and/or funded via other means.

We are open for suggestions and are willing to help those that want to make this system a reality.

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