A referral intermezzo

Update on our upcoming referral system, November 8th

5 min readNov 8, 2019

Hello again!

For this update, we will mainly delve deeper into the upcoming referral system. Development has been a bit slow this past week due to some staff catching the cold that’s been going around. Not to worry though, we are back in business.

Step by step

The Real Life Referral System will work as follows.

You create a new document (poster) in the “Create new document” tab
The document contains a selected background, your QR code, a custom text and your own profile’s QR code, username and identification code at the bottom.
Next, in the “My documents” tab it shows all of your posters with the cumulative XP and TUBE rewards earned from successful signups. (Note: not from the AirTime shares at this time yet, this requires a lot of additional bookkeeping and optimizations to track properly).

Scroll down for a visualization of a poster template.

Under “My referrals” it shows the status of referred users who’ve successfully signed up using your referral code.
From the moment a new referral appears, you are earning 10% of the AirTime they generate.
The referred user receives 500 XP upon signing up (we might increase this number).
Once the referred user passes a threshold of 5 TUBE generated by their own “viewer” AirTime, you receive a 100 XP bonus. This point marks the referral as “verified” according to the referral system.
The 5 TUBE threshold must be reached within 90 days. Outside of this window, the referral is considered dormant. In this case, no XP or TUBE rewards are paid out, only potential future AirTime shares.
Next, an option named “Upload selfie” appears to claim a $1.00 USD reward for the referral (in TUBEs). In order to claim this reward, you must open the referred user’s profile page and make a selfie with it. The selfie should clearly show yourself and the user’s profile page in the frame (using your computer screen or smartphone, for example).
You can preview your selfie to get the format right before posting. At the top of the selfie image it will say “Welcome, @username!” with a QR code of the user’s profile page in the top right. At the bottom of the image it shows your profile’s QR, identifier and username, identical to your document. You can click “Upload selfie” again to retry, and “Post selfie” to proceed.
Once you click “Post selfie”, this will automatically post your selfie to your own profile page, accompanied by a stock text:

Thanks for joining with my referral link [@user]! #welcome #bittubers
Check out [@user]’s profile here: [referred user’s profile link]
Sign up with my #referral link here and earn a 500 XP sign-up bonus!
[referral link]

Once posted, the “Upload selfie” and “Post selfie” buttons under “My referrals” are replaced by a link to this post.
When your selfie post has been up for at least 5 days, the $1.00 USD claim is approved. The referral under “My referrals” will be marked as “Paid”. Platform moderators approve or decline your selfie, by either doing nothing or removing the post using the moderation system if it does not meet the guidelines. If your selfie is declined within the approval period, you get a new chance to make one that meets the guidelines.

Poster template (custom text above and below QR code omitted)

That’s it! But why, though?

Sounds complicated? Let us explain the benefits.

First and foremost, no one needs to understand the reasons behind the system in order to use it. The solution is proper UX: create a document, get a referral, wait, upload a selfie, wait some more, and you’re done.
Referrers have a direct incentive to promote the AirTime extension to potential new users, since referred users must generate at least 5 TUBEs of AirTime on their own to be verified by the referral system.
AirTime rewards are always paid, while additional rewards are protected from abuse by a generous threshold.
The selfie system is essentially a community-powered advertising campaign. The 5 days approval window serves as verification and as a possibility for us and the community to share these selfies around on other social media. It shows the people behind the platform. Real people attract other real people and this could change the widely-held opinion that alternative platforms are mainly occupied by anonymous trolls.
Secondly, the selfie system helps new users get a head start, of they play it smart. Using someone’s referral link means your new profile gets an instant visibility boost to that user’s subscriber base and wider community. Before you hit the 5 TUBE mark, you have enough time to set up your profile properly. Once your referrer welcomes your arrival, you have a chance to jump in the comments section to explain who you are and engage with potential followers.
Those who don’t like this selfie business are still rewarded by AirTime shares and XP. In some cases, once their verified referrals stack up, the incentive to make a selfie becomes ever greater, as this is leaving good money on the table.

At the end of the day, we think this is a pretty water-tight system. It might look convoluted at first, but each step is deliberately chosen to eliminate abuse and to maximize our return on investment in terms of exposure and engagement. In other words, new users aren’t bought, they are earned.

Hindsight referrals

Additionally, it has been requested that we include an “after the fact” referral window for new signups, in case they forgot to use a referral link from a friend and would like to claim the 500 XP afterwards. We think this is a good idea. We will review this feature after the referral system goes live. We will likely add this with a 30-day availability window after signup.

Another referral system?

Lastly, we are exploring a parallel ‘premium’ referral system for paid members (Plus or higher membership). In this hypothetical system, users will receive a big XP bonus when using a button on your profile page as referral. You will then receive a substantial XP reward in case these users get a membership themselves, which will in turn lower your own membership fees significantly.

It would be a mutually beneficial system to try to on-board more paid memberships. Ideally, we would integrate this into the main Real Life Referral System — so stay tuned for more details.

Wrapping up

To wrap up this article, here is the latest beta changelog.

Changelog (beta): https://beta.bittubers.com/changelog

Release Version: B0.1 Revision: 0.021 (November 7th 2019)

Adjusted thumbnails from YouTube to correct aspect ratio.
Added new languages to site: Galician, Finish, Chinese, Catalán, Indonesian.
The translation files are open for community input in github.com/ipbc-dev/bittubers-translate
Enhanced the performance of the explore data retrieval.
Enhanced overall performance of the guest views (home, explorer, recommended and galleries).
Began preparation work for backend optimizations on data search (on-going).
Continue reviewing and fixing all translation texts (on-going).
Resolved 13 reported issues.

Thanks for reading this far! Let us know what you think about the referral system and possible improvements in the future.

Have another great weekend,

Your BitTube Team