Splinterlands Ambassador Program Announcement
Splinterlands proudly introduces our Brand Ambassador program. The objective is to convert current players into evangelists for the game and help Splinterlands cover more ground, grow the player base, and create relationships with local businesses.
Targets
The goal of the outreach is to work with two general types of companies that have fewer than 5 franchise locations.
- Gaming stores that sell trading card games.
- Entertainment facilities that have ticket redemption systems (play a game, get tickets, redeem tickets for candy, plastic toys, and drones).
What would a brand Ambassador do?
You'd take promocards and a poster that we send you to these local businesses and ask them to share the cards and hang the poster. If they accept you'll log contact info for the store.
Poster
it's 18x24 inches. It looks like this!
General Pitch
Hi, I'm Jimmy, I'm a Splinterlands Ambassador. I'm working with local businesses to bring the Splinterlands game to players in my hometown.
Splinterlands is a trading card game. The game started in 2018. To date we've played 12 million games, the players have traded more than one million dollars worth of cards between eachother, the cards are worth over 5 million dollars, and the game has hosted tournaments worth almost $100,000 for the players.
Accounts are free on Splinterlands, but if players want to earn prizes they have to unlock an account upgrade. Normally these upgrades are $10 but these promo cards make that upgrade free.
As players rise up higher in the ranks they can earn more and larger prizes. To rise up in the ranks many players buy booster packs.
The code on this card unlocks the account upgrade, and also tracks who brought players into the game. I can log these codes to this store and a portion of any sales of booster packs that come through players from these codes will go to the store.
So, unlike Trading Card Games that went digital and cut out the retail stores, Splinterlands makes you parters in the success of the game.
I also have this poster that if you hang it and players scan the QR code they'll be tied to this store and a portion of revenue from what they spend on packs will go to the store!
So, I'm not asking you to buy anything. I am wondering if you can distribute these cards and hang up this poster?
Who are we trying to get to play?
With this campaign we're looking for people who like physical trading card games and are willing to explore a digital game. Players should be 13 or older before they have their own account. Currently all materials are only available in English.
Revenue Sharing
- Store - 10% of USD sales if they want checks (Minimum of $100 before we send a check) // 10% of all sales instantly paid in crypto if they sign up with a Splinterlands account
- Ambassador - 5% referral fees for all purchases made by players that signed up via a promo card or QR code from the stores. DEC purchases not included.
Length of time
As long as the store continues to promote us the store and player will be eligible to receive referral rewards.
Management
@aggroed is the main point of contact. If you have questions you should feel free to reach out in discord.
Application
Those who are interested in participating can fill out the following form to apply: https://forms.gle/Nfjev6pcMrmReqHE6.
Anyone accepted into the Ambassador Program must agree to and abide by our code of conduct and community standards (detailed in the application form) and work with us to understand the role and responsibilities.
To be clear this isn't a full time job. It's taking a weekend or two to travel to game stores and entertainment facilities to see if they'll play ball. You and the store get a chance to share in the success of the game, players get a great game, and we collectively grow our ecosystem.
Should be fun.
Reserve the Right
Especially since this is just starting we reserve the right to alter the plan if the need arises.
Stay tuned for more updates from the Splinterlands!
Website | Blog | Discord | Telegram | Shop
Awww the problem is Estonians generally are staying away from cryptocurrency. I know very little estonians that deal with Cryptocurrency and even less people that know about steem.
I have tried getting my friends to play but they lose motivation really quickly when they only earn about 0.1$ a day from bronze league (which is amazing in my oppinion, that you can earn from playing a game)
I constantly remind my friends of how well I have done on Steemmonsters and that they can do it too (I basically made a 200$ steemit account into 2400$ using mostly Steemmonsters :D ).
Alot of my friends promised me that they will try to start playing again once they can play from an app on their mobile phones, so that's what I am waiting for.
I am 99.9% certain that no nearby shops or corporations don't even want to hear about this idea, since it's too new and crazy sounding to them.
Btw Estonian is a REALLY advanced country when it comes to technology and internet, but IDK why Estonians are so against cryptocurrencies. (Probably because Estonians don't want to risk with anything they have earned).
I've applied. I can think of a few places already.
Great idea!
Every time I walk past the cool games store around the corner I have thought of going in and promoting Splinterlands.
Now I'll have the material to do it properly.
Great idea! Do you plan on getting the material translated so that we can reach people around the globe?
This is so awesome! Another way to earn money in Splinterlands!
Its nice to read yous are thinking of new ways to reward those who are willing to put in the work. For me 5% seems low to put such work in but others may disagree.
I would like to see yous rework the affiliate system. An official affiliate site with tiered pay structures would be great. Don't get me wrong, I'm appreciative that there's a commision at all but 5% isn't very motivating.
I did allot of online affiliate work in the past and getting anyone to do any type of serious work for 5% commision fee is going to be a hard sell. 5% is great for the general public as a recommend your friend bonus but for those who are more interested in earning and advertising Splinterlands outside of STEEM, 5% isn't likely going to motivate us.
I could be wrong and I wish yous the best with this new campaign.
Length of time
Unless I'm misunderstanding something, the above I don't like at all. It reads as if you will take commisions away (stop commisions) from past sign ups once a Store stops selling/given away the Splinterlands product.
Its not the fault of the affiliate/ambassador if a store closes shop or stops selling Splinterland products. If Sign ups are active the ambassador still deserves his commision for directly or indirectly introducing those players to the game.
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.
I have read the post and I see that this program is mostly for US region and for some people who want to be a real ambassador.But I think it would be also great if you have launched a system for becoming online ambassador too.
Personally,I have been thinking of promoting Splinterlands online by writing engaging contents and sharing different contents in social media account.If we can regularly produce contents describing why people should play this game and how it can help them earn then many people would be interested in joining this game specially from different countries with poor economy where cost of living is low.
Some people can even start playing this game for a full time living and by including more people to our community we can grow this game.We all love splinterlands and want this game to be popular for our own benefits.
Sometime I imagine what if we had hundred thousands of players playing this game everyday.How big the market would become if that happened.So I offer my suggestion that you also launch a plan for recruiting online ambassador who will promote Splinterlands by blogging and promoting Splinterlands on different social media platforms.
Agree. The same thoughts of our Russian Community online project.
Very cool. I like the idea a lot and will apply. I hope that we can get a lot of local places to give this a shot.
This could work!!
QUESTIONS
separate stickers tied to unique ids. Generic poster is generic. Sticker makes it unique.
Ambassador should have them on hand when at the store.
Yes for getting into playing, not really for attaching to the referral link.
Stickers is a great solution for QR codes on already printed material!