It is very great commission, but once again there is no guarantee that affiliate users will get the payment as there is no escrow. To be honest $5 for every 1 ticket ($20) is just too good to be true IMO. It is very hard to promote a new site especially a lottery/raffle site with no good drawing system and escrow for the first time. I doubt people will start to promote your site to earn $5 per ticket bought by their referrals because of the mentioned reasons.
Hey Panjul,
I thought you wanted us to take a smaller percent from the prize pool, so we decided to share the profits with our partners, but seems like you are still not happy if we increase rewards via this affiliate program. Regarding your escrow comment, let me address that first. We started this raffle just this month, and decisions like this takes time; so this is currently still in discussion among our team. In my opinion (not my team decision), I am not for escrow idea because of the following reasons.
From my research on other raffles, like Princess Margaret Lotto for example, when they get let's say 10% of the revenue in their bank, they begin to spend it on advertising and operating costs. So right now, it's a working business model vs escrow which isn't used in raffles that I know of. Keep in mind that Satoshi Dice and other big risk formats don't have escrow too. None of the big bitcoin casinos have that (correct me if I am wrong). Moreover, you need to be wary even if someone uses escrow because there are scams there too (https://blockonomi.com/erc-20-token-guide/#Watch_Out_Scammers_Can_Make_ERC-20_Tokens_Too). Also, what if our escrow provider goes under and our funds are tied up? Then all our efforts would be ruined as well because of someone else.
Also, since this is round 1, we are using most of our profits to promote our raffle. For example, you already know about our affiliate program and our banner advertisements in various sites; you also know about our free tickets given out initially and we are also planning to have multiple smaller draws along the way, so our overhead cost is huge for round 1 Another problem with the crypto world, since we are accepting only crypto payments, what if we have our escrow funds in BTC, but BTC crashes and we have to pay $1,200,000 USD in prizes? I doubt escrow would give us the flexibility to transfer a portion to stable fiat money and to use our revenue towards promotions. Once again, this is only my personal opinion and this does not reflect a final decision from my team as we are still debating on using an escrow.
And now, to address your concerns about our drawing process. We are going to let a third party do the draw. We are planning to get the people from random.org themselves (if possible, or someone well known) to do the draw, but we will not do the draw ourselves. Would you rather have the people who made the raffle come up with a process to draw (more chances of manipulating the draw) instead of a completely unrelated third party (that is also well established)? Do you think random.org is not fair in choosing its random numbers? If you have concerns about how random.org chooses random numbers, check out their FAQ page as they have tons of information. Thanks.
Regards,
CryptoEbe