How could we do affiliate links on SAFE?

Just as the topic mentions, I’m very curious how this could be done. As far as I know affiliate links generally use cookies and I’m not entirely certain but I assume our browsers won’t want to do such things. Which begs the question.

Affiliate links aone it will be very useful but I have some creative ideas of how to use them that I think could be pretty nifty. Still brain storming but would love to see some community and/or dev insight on the matter. Cheers!

2 Likes

Not sure if Peruse supports query strings in the URL, but if it does I think the affiliate ID could just be added to the URL, and the target web app could do with it as it wishes when the user clicks the link.
eg) safe://mysite?affiliateID=123456789 could increment affiliate 123456789’s hit count by 1, credit them with a percentage of sales from that visit to the site, etc.

3 Likes

You could go affiliate links with your apps MD’s.

Safe://wes.site/my-aff-id

Your app takes that and stores it in an app-global-var MD, now it’s on record forever.

I’m behind atm; so, unclear…

your apps MD’s

Does the app have its own data that own it can write to?.. is it visible to the user; is it publicly visible??.. is it writable by other apps even???

Wouldn’t affiliate links be a form of tracking and go against what the SAFE Network is all about?

1 Like

SAFE is for everyone… even affiliates? I can only guess there is some valid use for them.

I’m guessing but I wonder that if a website is looking to reward a referral - which is the limit of my understanding of what affiliate links are trying to achieve, then perhaps whatever mechanism allows for safecoin to be managed can support some indirect bounce for that reward to action and jump the user into where they want to be.

1 Like

It is indeed to award a referral. Amazon is famous for them. People will talk about products or sometimes not even and leave an affiliate link in the description in podcasts, websites, blogs, social media, YouTube videos, and they get a commission on purchases made with that link. It’s a good way to get people to motivated to move things but in current form on the legacy web they use cookies that track you afaik which we obviously don’t want on SAFE. It’s nice seeing the ideas roll in, keep them coming!!

My thought was:

Apps get their own container they ask the user if they can make.
Data for that app is sandboxed to that container, but app has write permissions.
The app will want to store data for the user using the app in that sandbox.

So it’s still the users data, the user can still mess with it, view it, modify it, but the app can still use it and reference it. So if user A invites user B, then B spends money, your app can look up/ send part of that to who referred them (user A) as kick some back as a thank you.

Opens some interesting doors to toy with stuff as a user. :stuck_out_tongue:

Side note maybe worth its own topic.
A malicious app has read/write/modify permissions in its sandbox.
Bugging the user every time you write something (costing SAFECoin) would be a ux nightmare. But what if an app waited some time, then writes a boatload of garbage filling up a users space?

Should an app ask for an up front allocation amount they can’t go over when asking for permissions? It can be upped later with a new permission request, but I’d hate to see all my space wiped out while I sleep.

3 Likes

I think in general people will use apps where the user has to pay for mutations or the app has to pay for mutations which it pays for by being a subscription service. There are other options as well but I think we’ll see the more straight forward ones be most popular. I see what you’re saying though.

Not just with that link. All visits to Amazon after that time, or at least within some time, will go be credited to the affiliate. Unless another affiliate link was clicked in the meantime, because the last on is the winner.

If the rest of the thing is in place, that would not be impossible on Safe either. For example, store a cookie and automatically go to the special URL from Javascript after the page is loaded.

1 Like

I think this is correct. If I remember right the cookies can be stored up to 30 days or something?

Does Peruse store cookies? I don’t know enough about that to say.

I’d say the APP has to ask permissions to store info (in MDs) and that can have a field for referral. As has been mentioned above. It the user doesn’t give the APP permission then no referral stored.