Referral or affiliate marketing is a big thing in the online world, and not only, since it started with offline businesses.
The perception on affiliate marketing depends from person to person on a wide spectrum, from highly positive to highly negative, mostly based on their own experience with affiliate marketing, how it was used, if they got scammed in businesses promoted via referrers or if they succeeded or not themselves in affiliate marketing.
How the referral system is created matters too. Some referral systems collapse under their own weight, or are too permissive and easy to game. Others offer too small incentives to become attractive. Finding the right balance is not easy.
But with the right approach, a business can have so much success with a referral system that it hardly if ever needs any marketing of their own.
Anyway... Back to our topic. InLeo recently added a fully functional referral system, that pays LEO rewards to the referrer on referrals signing up, threading, blog posting, or becoming Premium:
The referral rewards are counted but not paid out immediately. One needs to reach a certain threshold of rewards to be able to claim them. Looks like nobody has reached it so far. That prevents some quick hits, which is good, but also could discourage some people, depending on how high that threshold is.
Until now, if someone wanted to refer someone else to InLeo, they'd need to share their referral link. For example, mine is:
https://inleo.io/signup?referral=gadrian
If someone who isn't a Hive user goes through that link and creates a Hive account using the InLeo signup process, it would be counted as my referral. Same for anyone else, if they put out their own referral link instead of mine.
But... this approach is quite restrictive, as you'd need to share your referral link and the person needs to sign up using it, preferably right away, otherwise they will probably lose it.
The way Amazon does it, and how Inleo will do it going forward (not live yet!), is to create a cookie file on the device of anyone seeing Amazon products. One of the things tracked in that cookie is the referrer, and the cookie lifetime is usually 30 days.
So, if we translate this for Inleo, it's like this. If someone - not a Hive user - sees a blog post through Inleo, (or a thread, or a short), and within 30 days they join Hive through Inleo, they will be counted as the referral of the author of that blog post, thread, or short, respectively.
There are exceptions to this. For example, if within the 30 days period, they see another Inleo link from another author, then they will become their potential referrer for 30 days, as the cookie gets replaced. If they delete cookies on their computer, then this association is lost too.
However, we have to admit this should work pretty well... Even from organic search, if people don't push links on other social media.
I don't think it's been discussed in the Inleo AMA, but I suppose existing referral links will continue to work after the referrer set by cookie system will be implemented. Otherwise, existing referral links shared throughout the web by users until now would become pointless.