Ask HN: What's a reasonable affiliate marketer charge? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's a reasonable affiliate marketer charge?

2 pointsretube6 comments

We will shortly be launching a b2b service, basically a subscription webapp.

We plan initially to market via a) our investor's high traffic website, and b) with various affiliate networks.

So we can begin negotiating I'm trying to get a feel of what a typical cut (revenue share) might be. For the investor's site we'll do CPA, and I guess the same/equivalent for the affiliates.

The complicating aspect here is that we do not intend to have fixed length subscription contracts. It'll be recurring billing monthly until the customer cancels. At this point we have no idea what the typical length of subscription might be.

Any thoughts on both appropriate deal structures and rev shares much appreciated.

Thanks

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The revenue share model is going to be your best bet until you are capable of determining your lifetime value for a user.

It is rather impossible to speculate without knowing the niche and the price point for someone to subscribe. Even then things such as conversion rates, landing page sign up process, and website copy all have influence on whether a campaign is going to be profitable (read: worth the time) of a proper affiliate marketer.

It can be somewhat tenuous going down this route before ever even doing in house testing so my advice would be to start there first before approaching affiliates/networks if you are serious about going down this route and succeeding.

I'm guessing the problem is that since you dont know how long users will stay on the monthly contract for, you dont know how much each user , on avg, will make you ergo don't know what to pay affiliates for commission?

Easy solution. Have your commission be a recurring commissions. Basically they get X% of each recurring payment. That way the marketers are trying to target users who will stay on board for a long time (ie. make them more commission).

Yes I think we'll have to do something like this. We can certainly do this for our investor's website, but not sure how things are set up with third-party affiliates and whether this is even possible.

Any idea what a typical cut might be? Or is this like the length of string?

Yeah, its definitely possible (I own an affiliate network). Depending on how robust the tracking software your using is, you should have that option available.

Typical cut is a tougher question. What price are you thinking for as monthly subscription?

probably around £50 - £100 / month

I'd say do something like this.

Flat rate on initial signup + % of every recurring payment after (this way you can get away with giving them a smaller percent than if you just did straight %)

$20 on Initial signup and payment + 15% of recurring payments.

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