Steem - First Refer A Friend Program

Welcome back to the channel. I hope you're having a great day. So today I want to talk about a new project the BitcoinNYK team is part of, and that is called the Refer a Friend program. It is the first one I think we're aware of, um, that is involved with the Steem blockchain and the SPS, or the Steam Proposal System, is a feature that came about on Steam during the last hard fork. And how it works is, uh, if you have an idea, if you have— you want to develop something on the Steam blockchain, anything to help to promote the Steam blockchain, you can submit these proposals. The community can upvote them, and if the community feels that they are needed and something of value, uh, that's going to help build up the they can actually give you the funds over to help you develop these ideas. And so it's been some interesting things that have come across the proposal. And so the future of STEAM is gonna be quite interesting with what some of these proposals can do, where the money's being spent, and if it's being spent wisely, and if it's gonna do anything for the chain. So I want to talk to you all a little bit today about this, get some insight and feedback from you all. If you'd like to see something like this, you know, some of the issues with it, some things you'd be concerned about. And we very much love your feedback and input on that. And if this is something you all like at all, but we thought it was a great idea because with the BitcoinMYK project, we already have a referral program. So we thought it would be great to some way implement that into our, our program. So let's talk a little bit about today. So referral programs are, are used by big corporations from Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, banks to insurance companies, you name it. The most successful ventures in the world, companies in the world have referral programs. Data has shown they're quite successful. Marketing accounts for about 50% of some major business revenues. Creating marketing campaigns can be very expensive but effective and the lifeblood of anything you want to see grow and prosper the direction of your endeavor. In cryptocurrency, Bitcoin has achieved the branding and network effect that has made it synonymous with cryptocurrency. Although not yet mass adopted, the branding and marketing for Bitcoin has taken off quite well. A product like Bitcoin at this point may or may not need a great deal of marketing. However, there's no such thing as too much marketing as long as it's the right and most effective type of marketing. Steam branding has yet to reach its full potential. The idea of build it and they come would be nice if it worked outside of the theory. Why do you need marketing? It's simple. Without marketing, you can become irrelevant. You may not reach the audience you need. Uh, if nobody cares to use your product or doesn't get enough buzz, it can become obsolete, or maybe people just don't know you're out there. Cryptocurrency depends heavily on media attention. Unfortunately, it doesn't receive the media attention it needs on the level to have masses of people able to understand the importance of it. The effect of more people creates more value. In the early days of of Steam, press of large earnings on blogs pulled in people and created an uproar as they struggled to gain entry to understand why this was happening. The introduction of the world to Steam created a small sensation and culture of people drawn to this idea. And having so many moving parts to create this attention when social and cultural clashes on Steam blockchain and tribalism like customs, not relatable to everyone involved. We believe this is what caused Steam to somewhat decline. Now Steam is doing a great job of stopping these cultural clashes through the ideas like Hives and Steam Groups. And now that things that challenge the disconnections are being met by Steam now to launch marketing campaigns to bring people value back to STEAM is probably the direction we should go in now. But to kind of break that down a little bit, you know, basically saying that there was things going on in the culture of STEAM, right? We was clashing of ideas and ways that people felt the change should be, um, run. And, uh, these people clashed together, and sometimes it didn't end well. Sometimes people maybe left, or they just disliked the direction the chain was going. It caused some to leave, to try to fork off with CLOZ, to do a variety of things. And people who have been around on Steam know the full outcome of many of those things. But the hives and groups, Steam groups that came out of the last hard fork, I believe was one of the best steps forward to trying to place people in segments of Steam that that are going to be more relatable to them. And I think it's going to get rid of a lot of the friction. But getting back to how to get people to know about this, and if it's going to be in our best interest to get more people involved, to bring more value in some way. Marketing is expensive. How is it we achieve this cost effective, uh, in a cost effective way and make our marketing dollars go to maximum exposure? You know, first I want to say that I don't wish to offend anyone or projects on this proposal system. However, I would like to say that I believe that we have moved in the wrong direction about how to make Steam this great product to the masses. There are so many great things about Steam already, it defies logic and reason almost for there to be noticeable declines in Alexa rankings, visits to blogs, as well as the reduction in the quality of content. So let me stop right there and try to point you to where I was getting at with this. So many of us on the Steem blockchain probably are aware that Steem has, if not, uh, thousands, hundreds of applications that do a variety of things. We, we have these clones that mimic many great successful already platforms, whether it be something like Twitter or Reddit or Instagram, Pinterest, you know, whatever the case may be. Steam has models for all of these things. So it has kind of made me take a step back and go, is it really just the development and applications that need to be worked on? Right. And so Steam is fun to build on. It's easy to build on. And so it makes a lot of developers want to focus on that. Now here's the problem. Problem is that might not really be what we need to be focused on. And in my idea, it is that the social, sorry, the social interaction and the marketing and the outreach is more important than many of those ideas. And the dollars we're spending towards there, I just think they could be spent more cost effective somewhere else. That is my opinion about it, right? Um, so in that way, my direction is more based on the outreach and marketing and, uh, things I believe that will solve many of the problems, right? So the mood and distribution of steam, we're just now going over some of the issues I think we were able to ascertain over the— maybe what are some problems that caused the Alexa ranks to go down and cause some problems in that way. It is hard to point to one specific idea. There may be several factors causing some of the decline, but the fact of the matter is Steam introduced a great idea where you conveniently can earn based on your social media interactions, whereas large networks like Facebook compensate users at zero. However, the system still has billions of users, and even slight declines are not enough to take away from having that much network effect and site usage. So it's very difficult for something like Facebook not to work at this point, right? And in other words, in comparison to something like Steam, we're saying that even if Facebook were to decline at a great level, it still would have branding and network effect to have a lot of users and propel it forward, whereas it's a little bit different with Steam. Big the declines can be almost destructive. And, uh, Russ, you know, we've went over some ideas. It's just being this idea of fairness that's not being there from distribution that sways some people, disagreements, cultural clashes. Um, many of the directions we've taken with the Steem blockchain through the Steem proposal system, I just don't feel realistically will even touch the surface of many things that would need to happen to get Steem back more valuable in the public side and with a positive sentiment. Um, so the real issue is about community and social interaction. In our opinion, this is why we've created the Steam-based Refer a Friend program. So to illustrate how it works, our site, which is part of the Steam community BitcoinNYKid, has an affiliate dashboard which will take take you to shortly. And, um, we believe we're going to be able to integrate this into the system that pays Steam users to refer their friends, family, business associates, what have you. So how would it work? Okay, our referral friend project would work simple. This— the system will, in a tri-way system, pay 3 people out, or 3 entities, right? The first will be BitcoinMYK. So basically what we're saying here is the system is going to be integrated through BitcoinMYK. It's already developed. Uh, there would need to be no funding to go in this system. So the great thing about this, uh, to develop the system rather. So the, the great thing about this will be that every, almost every dollar then pretty much is going to be going back into the referral friend program, right? So the first will be BitcoinMYK as the main referral, right? So we will, we will actually earn the same thing as every referral, right? Kind of think of it like a downline. So as the main refer— next, the referee, right? That's the person who's going out there posting their links, uh, to their social media. They're posting their links to their YouTube videos, right? Uh, and the last is the referee. That person also gets paid. So now the new person coming in, they're going to get a little bit too. And so it's a kind of a win-win situation for everybody. In order to make this as cost-effective as possible and have no dollars wasted, BitcoinMYK will use its existing affiliate program on its website, which is an SCOT token as well. This dashboard would then match up to our Steam Group, which is part of the Steam blockchain at BitcoinMYK Groups. Or they could do a hard-rooted integration that would bring us back to, we believe, spending more unnecessary money in development but lacking the user base to bring us more value. So that's just, you know, just saying, let's try to cut some dollars here and spend them more wisely. We already got an affiliate program dashboard. Let's find a way to integrate that in. And that's what we're going to do and show you shortly how we're going to do that and put that money back into the referral program. At the same time, have this usable system people can benefit from. We believe the thousands of applications we currently have are sufficient. We have everything from a version of Instagram to Reddit to Quora. To video hosting, to gaming, you name it, we got it. We feel we have almost touched every base in that area. The one thing we don't have is users and enough buzz for people to care about Steam. So by foregoing any more system development and costs associated with that, we prefer to match our dashboard to serve us to match referrers and referees to accounts part of our Steam group are part of. So in a refer-a-friend system, we then issue payments to both the referrer and referee and promote the product in a way both parties earn by joining. This could solve several issues. So upon getting their accounts, they gain STEAM in their wallet, and so does the referral. This may incentivize a large amount of people to participate in this program. These type programs have also proven to be quite effective. When the funds are depleted, the referral program will end. This is important because there are only going to be so much funds. And we don't want people to, uh, be out there working hard to get referrals and get money, and there's nothing in the pot because we've exhausted the funds and we're waiting to see if the affiliate program should continue. So there, there is an end date to it, like many referral programs, and it can end. And what would happen is, uh, we would just end that program at that point in time. People stop earning, and if it starts back up, we will let all the referrals know. So Uh, of course they would be under this, um, information in the terms of using the referral program. Um, at this point it will be up to the community to approve if it relaunches. Affiliate market— marketeers will be given notice of this, and any affiliates earn off links cash will be compensated via the recommission of the program. Um, so, uh, BitcoinNYK tokens will also be rewarded in event referrals don't receive compensation. So compensation— so we're going to talk a little bit about how there will still be bonuses through Bitcoin and YK tokens if that does happen in the middle. But really, it will follow the, uh, the model of many other affiliate programs that say, hey, we're running out of money, so this is ending on such and such and such, and you won't be compensated after that point of time unless there is more funding to that program and the community decides they want to restart it up. The return on the dollar spent is probably more valuable than one SBD, one Steam Back Dollar, per account. So we would like to believe that new accounts would equal out to being more than the money spent. We believe it would be dollars well spent. So let's talk about a little bit about the funding. What are, what are we talking about here? And, uh, help you understand, uh, you know, why it's all kind of integrated into this more so than having to be spent on development or something like that. We will first start this in phases to see if it's effective and if we should continue. So we first start seeking up to $25,000 Steemback dollars. For example, every part of the Triway referral system will receive an equal amount. So for example, the BitcoinNYK system would receive 1 Steemback dollar. The referrer would receive 1 SteemBack dollar, and finally the new account would receive 1 SteemBack dollar. The hope would be to incentivize and stimulate the ideas about the Steem blockchain to get enough people talking about it. Video content creators would gain by posting their affiliate links on their videos. All through social media, people would be incentivized to earn Steemback dollars per referral. So in other words, um, like a video content creator, a marketeer, people all around social media in the cryptocurrency space could actually just get this link, put it on all their videos, put it on their social media, and they can earn Steemback dollars, uh, every new account they get. Now, if the first phase proves successful and we believe this to be working and the community agrees, we'll seek more funding in stages up until the value transfer back to Steam is acceptable. Some market analysis determines new account value to range anywhere from $1 on average to about $200. Uh, this has been hard to determine based on the Steam model. However, now that Steam runs advertising, it is quite possible new accounts and eyeballs could, uh, make this possible. We'd like to believe these accounts would be worth more than one Steambat dollar on average. If that idea or assessment is correct, then it would mean the dollars are well spent. So let's explain that a little bit. This is kind of if you were to picture Facebook. So when Facebook went public, there was a determination made by the market that determined every account Facebook had was equal to a certain amount. Now Steam works a lot different than Facebook. The, the whole policies are different, terms of service are different. Steam is, um, basically decentralized. Facebook is not. But some of the ideas are the same. Core ideas, social network running advertisements is of some value. And if there are more people there, there is more value in the advertising and the money going back into the system, correct? So in that way, that would mean every account, every new account on Steam would have a dollar value basically, right? Now what would that dollar value be? We don't know. Would it be more than one Steam Back dollar? Probably so. Would it be $2 or $3 or $10 maybe, or $200? We don't know, but it is quite possible it could work out to be more than the value of what we've spent. And getting these new, uh, users are gonna, uh, transfer to a value in many different ways. So let's go over our closing thoughts here. Steam is a marvelous product. There are only some— there are only small factors, I believe, that hold it back. This is one of them and can easily be corrected. Again, I don't wish to discourage any products out there or proposals. The data does suggest that we have a large amount of applications that don't draw enough people. If they don't draw people in, then they aren't working for us. So, so building more things may not necessarily be a solution. We believe this may be the missing component. We thank you for your consideration of our proposal. We'll be glad to answer any questions, comments, or concerns you may have. So quite interesting. I want to get you now over. I just want to demonstrate to you all how it would work, how the system would work. Uh, so we're going to run you over there real quick and, uh, and give you a demonstration. Alright, we're here on the BitcoinNYK site and we're in the affiliate area, right? This is my dashboard. Um, let's see here. And you can see it's generated an affiliate link for me, for my account, and the dashboard display is showing basically Any referrals I had, which referrals were paid, and all that good stuff. So this is what the Steam referrals are going to get. They're going to already get this implemented into the system. Now what we've chosen to do is kind of use our existing SCOT token, which runs on the Steam blockchain. We've, you know, described it as kind of like an ERC-20 token. And so it has its own value. It does several things. You can get information information about that in some of our other video series. But right now, to focus on how we would integrate this into the Referral Friend program to onboard members to Steem, as you can see that once it is identified who you've referred and who's responsible for that and who gets what, which in this case will be Steem back dollars, it will be programmed to, to give that out and do that, do those things. We come here and we click on social network. And what's gonna happen right from the same site, you can see we go right over to Steemit and to our groups, right? And what you got here is just basically you're running the mirror, mirror same integrated into Steemit front end that is, you know, using the groups. And people can basically start posting here. And not only that, but they can obviously get an account through Steemit by going to our groups if they don't have a group, right? I'm sorry, if they don't have a Steam account. And once they get that account, now they're integrated into Steam. They've been onboarded. That simple. And it is a very simple process to get people onboarded through the affiliate program. There's something already ready. We don't have to build or develop. And the money that we will be requesting would be split on each transaction like any referral program in, in, in, in, um, two layers, right? So it would be, uh, as we explained, BitcoinMYK getting one Steambat dollar on each new account, the referral getting one Steambat dollar and a referral fee. So that, that pretty much, um, describes how the system will work. I love to hear you guys' opinions about it. Tell me what you think. Tell me if you think this is going to be good for Steam. But that's all I want to say in this video. If you like content like this, don't forget to like and subscribe. And until next time, take care.