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Refereum is the first referral marketplace for games. The RFR token rewards gamers for their engagement and purchases with full transparency. Over 150,000 gamers have joined the platform in the two months since launch, and the number of gamers continues to grow exponentially.
The Refereum solution can be extended easily into other verticals. Our team is made up of veteran game industry experts and world-renowned blockchain specialists.
The Problem
Referral marketing is the most effective conversion tool to acquire new customers, but untrustworthy actors and expensive micro-payments have blocked its ability to scale. This is nowhere more apparent than in the gaming industry.
The video games industry is $109B and growing at 6% annually.
In recent years, the number of gamers has exploded -- today, 2.2B people play games, making it the single most popular digital entertainment content on any device. 1 2
Inevitably, social platforms like YouTube and Twitch have created strong gaming communities, and influencers and streamers now command promotional power and unprecedented reach. The top 10 influencers have an audience of 242m, double that of the recent Superbowl audience.
Gaming is now a booming professional sport (i.e. “eSports”) with the highest growth in the industry. International “supergamer” competitions can fill stadiums that rival those that host traditional premier sporting events. The 2016 International Dota 2 Championship, the richest eSports tournament had a prize of $21m, double that of The Masters. Professional gamers are fundamentally changing the market dynamics by bridging the private gaming world and the public sporting arena.
Marketing is critical to drive customer acquisition and usage, but costs are skyrocketing.
The gaming industry spends approximately $20B in advertising and marketing 4 and these costs are increasing fast.
Competition among game developers is intense. Blockbuster game developers now spend 2-3x the development cost for marketing and advertising through traditional channels to create “buzz” for their games. 5 At the same time, online customer acquisition costs are also rising.
A few dominant platforms capture the majority of advertising dollars and broadly, an average of 30% of developer revenues in distribution fees.
Referral marketing, a way to promote products through word-of-mouth, is a powerful channel and the most effective conversion tool.
Compared to other marketing channels, referred consumers have the best conversion to purchase, longer retention, and a higher lifetime value.
Referral through friends is the single most trusted form of advertising, 6 people are 4x more likely to buy when referred by a friend, 7 and the Lifetime Value of new customers via referrals is 16% higher than those that are not referred. 8 Gamers, more than in any other entertainment medium, place an even higher trust on referrals, as the community is especially tight-knit and highly opinionated.
Despite proven effectiveness, referral programs are difficult to track and compensate.
These campaigns suffer from fraud (e.g. fake influencer accounts, clickbots), reporting disparities between developers and platforms, leading to a loss of revenue for influencers, and many expensive intermediaries.
While industry giants can amplify a brand’s message through sharing, even they lack a mechanism to track the conversion funnel fully, from initial awareness all the way to a purchase.
Influencers are powerful agents of referral marketing. But again, no technical mechanism exists to track and pay an individual conversion for each view, like, share, or recommendation into a direct sale. The current approach requires developers to identify influencers manually, cold-contact them one by one, and negotiate unique deal terms, generally in the form of sponsorships.
The process is time-consuming, costly, nebulous, and lacks measurable goals. Moreover, it is nearly impossible to reward players with fiat currency because of cross-border banking complexities and geopolitical restrictions. As a result, influencers and engaged fans are not compensated accordingly.
Refereum Solution
Refereum resolves these problems around referral marketing in the video game industry.
Smart contracts established directly between developers and gamers create a decentralized, secure, and transparent marketplace with a record of purchases and referrals written into the Blockchain.
Our solution eliminates fraud, layers of middlemen, various onerous fees, and redistributes marketing budgets to gamers and influencers instead. Our solution transfers value from ad agencies and other intermediaries to influencers and gamers directly.
Game developers can purchase RFR tokens to reward influencers and players for specific actions; in turn, gamers can buy or earn tokens for their actions (e.g. streaming a new game), which can then be used to purchase more games or converted to cash. This active engagement between developers and gamers enables a continuous feedback loop, driving network effects and exponential growth.
Refereum allows anyone to participate without requiring a bank account. We are also an official partner of the Connext API, which allows average consumers to purchase RFR tokens securely with conventional payment methods like credit cards.
Refereum benefits all participants in the ecosystem:
• Developers can improve their marketing campaigns. They no longer have to pay huge upfront fees for campaigns that do not provide strong ROIs. They can reward individuals directly, after a successful purchase. The blockchain solution removes fraud and legal paperwork to reward not only for the purchase, but also a variety of call-to-actions. It enables microtransactions
of $0.0001 for completing a tutorial to $1m for winning an eSports tournament.
• Influencers can monetize their following. Any streamer or influencer,regardless of the size of their following, no longer has to wait to be approachedby ad agencies for campaigns, and instead, can choose relevant and monetizable content for their followers. Influencers with niche yet active audiences who may not have been sponsorshipmaterial previously, can now potentially earn a living.
• Even the average gamer can share in the token economy just for doing what they love. Simply by sharing links or moving up a gaming level, anyone can earn RFR tokens. The blockchain referral ecosystem will now allow the 99% of gamers that actually make up the vibrant community to participate economically as well.
Read more (PDF) > Refereum provides referrals on the blockchain
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