Any more details on how they made this work for them? Hard to pull off.
Is it hard to pull off? Give people a cut of the revenue from new paying customers who first visit by clicking their referral link. Everyone else does the work for you, but you lose control of the brand as people who only care about making a quick buck use your name to spam low-quality videos and medium articles.
Have a good product and then pay people a percentage when they sell it on your behalf. Works amazingly in some niches. I personally paid out affiliates around $1m for my SaaS