Cryptocurrency: Refereum - The decentralized affiliate marketplace for games that pays you

Refereum is a distribution platform that cuts out the marketing middleman, enables higher profits for developers, and directly rewards influencers and gamers to promote and play video games.

Over $170 billion has been spent on digital advertising annually in recent years, yet the industry is plagued with legacy inefficiencies. At $108 billion annually, video games are one of the largest and most profitable segments of the entertainment industry, surpassing the US film industry. Unfortunately, recent years show that game budgets have shifted from content creation to skyrocketing marketing costs enforced by the current monopoly on advertising avenues. While game streamers and content creators have amassed the most subscribers of anyone on the internet, they remain frustrated by the limited opportunities to monetize their followings; their fate is decided by centralized platforms. A generation’s dream of being paid to play video games is locked behind an industry status quo enforced by monopolizing marketing corporations.

The Refereum (RFR) utility token is a decentralized referral marketing and cash reward platform that

solves these problems.

Refereum’s open-market approach removes the legal costs of individualized marketing deals while making digital advertising middlemen irrelevant. Instead of letting marketing budgets go to another advertising conglomerate, Refereum funds engagement for cash awards in the gaming community and enables superior acquisition of new players. Refereum directly connects these groups, allowing gamers to make money sharing and playing video games, influencers to effectively monetize their followings, and studios to maximize the efficiency of marketing spend and player engagement.

Refereum is backed by a veteran game industry team with leadership experience from Electronic Arts, Zynga, Google, and other prominent gaming and platform roles. The smart contracts have been written by world-renowned white hat cryptography and cryptocurrency experts who have served from Tether to Polybius, and other similar high-profile initiatives. Refereum is advised by Twitch, the world’s largest gaming influencer platform, and Unity, the most widely used game engine in the industry.

Marketing Challenges

The largest inefficiency in the $108 billion dollar game industry today is the cost of customer acquisition, and this cost is growing at 113% a year. Video game consumers are exploding in number, surpassing 2.2 billion people, yet reaching this vast and growing demographic of players grows in price because video game studios must dedicate a rising ratio of spend to conventional advertising channels. Mobile and desktop games are seeing marketing costs grow from less than a dollar to more than $15 to acquire a single new player , while game creators of any success level still have to rely on sponsored content via social media. While spend on ads is likely to exceed $37 billion in 2017, the market is becoming saturated and losing effectiveness with most technically savvy consumers. Finding specific types of effective marketing channels continues to increase in difficulty, especially if the addressable market is the entire digital world. There are many ad networks with low quality audiences and sub-optimal tools that game studios are forced to invest a lot of time, energy and resources to find relevant players. On top of that, it’s often hard to track ROI and conversions because there is no direct link between players and the particular ad network. Within existing channels, targeting specific types of players can be exasperating: developers currently have no choice but to pay companies such as Google and Facebook to create “buzz,” and they have no other scalable solutions to directly involve or engage players through marketing efforts. This high price for customer acquisition is then passed to customers through aggressive monetization tactics, perpetuating the problem.

Influencer Challenges

Twitch and YouTube video game influencers entertain the largest audiences in the world, with games like Dota 2 surpassing 32 million viewers compared to just 20 million for Sunday Night Football. As viewers shift away from mainstream television towards YouTube, the content they watch also changes. Middleman companies for games are popping up to take advantage of developers and content creators, knowing that 84% of marketers are searching for this type of influencer marketing. Gamers making videos and streaming new games have become a billion-dollar industry in themselves. By sharing their gameplay and interacting with fans in real time, Twitch and YouTube influencers draw massive attention to the games they play; attracting these influencers has become a critical component of any successful marketing strategy in today’s market.

In the current ecosystem, these influencers are unable to fulfill the monetary potential of their fanbase. Influencers create loyal and engaged audiences from personal, interactive, and realtime relationships around specific game products. A new generation dreams of becoming fulltime streamers, but the barriers to entry are high. Those who overcome them face the constant challenge of sustaining their income from their passion. While some very elite influencers profit by licensing out their brands, the vast majority are limited in how to generate income from such passion. Current methods have fallen prey to numerous examples of large centralized platforms changing policies to the detriment of the creator: YouTube’s most subscribed influencer, PewDiePie, has gone on record decrying Google policy changes that negatively affect his gaming channel’s revenue . Currently, streamers attempt to deploy dozens of complicated techniques, from disruptive banner ads to unrelated endorsements in a largely unsuccessful attempt to monetize content. While the act is normalized, it’s most common for streamers to passively wait for donations from strangers.

Game developers attempt to incentivize and reward players for recommending games to their friends, but the mechanisms through which to do this are obtuse, rudimentary, and expensive. The current approach to influencer marketing has employees manually identify possible influencers, cold-contact them one by one, and legally negotiate separate unique deal terms with each influencer. The process is not only time-consuming and costly, but also delivers unpredictable results. Expensive game marketers, struggling game developers, and frustrated influencers are seeing their margins getting thinner across every possible angle.

Refereum Solution

Refereum solves these problems with an open-market approach that scales across any influencer platform, country border, and language. Influencers have the agency to choose relevant and monetizable content that’s for their fanbases. They have clear goals to earn Refereum that can be traded for cash value. Anyone with any level of influence can participate, including regular fans or individuals by simply sharing a game with a friend. Refereum enables unrivaled developer control over acquisition and reward criteria. Developers can choose what counts as a “referral,” moving beyond the industry precedent of only counting installs. For instance, instead of paying for installs that result in little or no engagement, developers only pay for quality traffic that makes it past the first level. Additionally, even basic implementations of Refereum severely limit fake traffic and bot installs, as human input for gameplay is often more effective than a captcha . Game studios no longer require massive budgets and legal paperwork to offer players cash rewards. They can award anything from one cent for each viewer who joins a Twitch stream during a 12-hour launch window, right up to a flat $10,000 eSports tournament prize. The economic rewards of the currency cannot be manipulated, because any tokens given out must first be bought and stocked into the game.

Influencer adoption is accelerated by a close relationship with Twitch, the most popular and established game streaming platform. Additionally, the implementation of Refereum itself is made remarkably simple for game developers through Refereum’s collaboration with Unity, the most commonly used game engine. Award bounties will be highlighted in-game and on Earn. Refereum.com for anyone to access and earn. Having already built a public proof of concept of this technology, the Refereum team’s work shows that such solutions are not only possible, but well within grasp.