Creators and affiliates
What should you pay a creator who has no followers?
Most programmes turn away anyone under 10,000 followers and lose the person who was about to be big. The two-door model: 0.5% with no gate at all, 0.75% and 1% for a verified audience.
How MarketWar handles it
The SHARE2EARN rate is DERIVED as the minimum of its own cap and every influencer band, in code — so cutting an influencer band automatically drags it down and it can never overtake. There is no number for anybody to remember to update, which is the only kind of rule that survives a codebase.
The standard affiliate programme has a follower gate, and the gate exists because verification costs money and higher rates need justifying. Both true. The cost is that you turn away everybody small, including the ones who are about to be large.
Two doors, one account
No gate at all. Name, email, earning. 0.5% of the eligible value of every verified sale the link produces. No application, no audience test, no review queue.
Verified bands. 0.75% from 5,000 verified followers, 1% from 10,000. These are reviewed precisely because they pay more.
They are two doors into the same account. Somebody joins with no audience, grows one, applies later, and the account they already have moves up — nothing earned is lost and nobody starts again.
The rule that makes it safe
The no-gate rate can never exceed the gated ones. Not as a policy somebody checks, but as arithmetic: it is defined as the minimum of its own cap and every band above it. Cut the 0.75% band tomorrow and the ungated rate follows it down automatically.
That matters because rate tables drift. A number typed into eleven places is a number that will be wrong in ten of them.
What "eligible value" means, and why it is not the checkout total
Commission is paid on the product value — with tax, delivery, tips, gift cards and refunds taken out. Money the merchant never keeps cannot fund a commission, and programmes that pay on the checkout total are paying creators out of VAT.
On a £120 checkout with £20 of tax and £6 of delivery, the eligible value is £94.
What is paid in cash and what is not
Cash follows verified sales. Everything else a creator does — posting, sharing, bringing people in — earns XP toward levels and bonuses instead.
That is not a downgrade dressed up. Engagement nobody can verify as revenue is engagement nobody can honestly pay for, and a programme that pays for unverifiable reach gets drained by whoever notices first.
Next: what you can afford, which products can carry it, and how the money reaches somebody with no bank account.
What this does not do
Paying anyone with no follower gate means paying people who send almost no traffic. That is the point of a percentage of verified sales — nothing happens until a sale does — but it does mean the programme's admin is spread across many small earners.
Common questions
Should I require a minimum follower count?
For the higher rate, yes — verification is what justifies paying more. For entry, no. A follower gate turns away the person with 800 people who trust them, which is frequently worth more than 80,000 who scroll past.
How do you stop people gaming a no-gate programme?
By paying on verified sales rather than reach, holding earnings until refund windows close, and running fraud checks that count real events — self-purchases, shared devices, posts taken down after payment.
What does the brand pay in total?
The creator's rate plus a flat 0.25% platform share, charged as an acquisition cost on sales the campaign produced — never to the creator and never to the customer.
Related
How much can you afford to pay an affiliate?
The arithmetic that decides an affiliate rate: contribution, the margin you protect, and the ceiling above which a sale costs you money. With the numbers worked through on a £100 product.
Why some products cannot carry a commission at all
Thin-margin products cannot fund a percentage, however small it looks against the price. What to do instead of quietly cutting the rate — and why a headline rate that shrinks is worse than no programme.
How do you pay a creator in a country with no bank account?
Nine payout rails including African mobile money, what each actually costs, and the tax question nobody answers: what happens when somebody's country issues no individual tax reference.