referral: how to?

Hi, how to tell Pond5 about referrals? there is this "Referrals" link on the "MyPond" page, but how to does this whole program work? Thanks.

Hi Mosjo,

We've been a bit reluctant when it comes to push referrals because we are afraid that someone will get the brilliant idea to spam 1'000'000 users for only $100 and then giving us a bad name for a long time.

In short, adding &referrer=username to a link makes pond5 set a cookie in the users browser. If user signs up and p5 finds a cookie with that referrer, username gets 5% of all the sales and 5% of all the purchases the new user makes under the first year.

Now, you all have a "homepage" url looking like:
http://www.pond5.com/artist/username
Problem is that this is a "magic" url. So that url is really:
http://www.pond5.com/index.php?page=artist&artist=username
(google for mod_rewrite if you're curious about that). You can hook a &referrer=username to the p5/artist/username, if you want, but that looks imho really bad.

So I added another alias for your homepages.
http://www.pond5.com/user/username
...which is the same as...
http://www.pond5.com/index.php?page=artist&user=username&referrer=username
The /user/ link is quite short, quite discrete and is hopefully good enough for a signature or such.

Should you want to use the referrer thing, use this link, and if not use the artist link. Internal linking in the site will be using /artist/ ofcourse.

To verify that this works, check your cookies for domain pond5.com before and after trying a /user/ link. You can also see your cookies https://www.pond5.com/it/index.php?page=sysinfo&what=http_headers.

On "My Page", bottom right you have an https://www.pond5.com/it/index.php?page=invite_hist.

Change http: to https: above for an encrypted version of the link.

Is this ok with everyone?

Best regards,
Marcus

Thank you marcus for the response, which I am sure makes absolutely sense, but at a fist glance at least looks very complex to me (I know, life IS complex and sometimes there is no work around this ;-)).

I see you are the programmer of the site. Is it possible for you to "make" that I was referred to this site by a user (It is true. I was not aware of this site and a user on another such site referred me and I signed up)?

What? Complex? I was even pedagogic and used yellow highlite and all sorts of things! ;-P

No problem. Send us the username, f.ex via https://www.pond5.com/it/index.php?page=contact_us and we'll make this user your referrer, provided that account creation dates makes sense.

Ok, had a talk with Tom who was fairly honest about my explanation skills so here's a condensed version:

http://www.pond5.com/user/username

Replace "username" with your username and this link will automatically set a referrer cookie. So if you give this link to someone who signs up you get the 5%.

Marcus, can you just make me his referrer !?

Hi Lee - You're now setup as Mosjo's referrer. Thanks for spreading the word :)

Just to clarify (or try to) Marcus' fluent Technese (which is kind of like a pidgin dialect of English mixed with pure machine code, with a Swedish accent thrown in):

If you drop us an email or sitemail, we will set up the referral arrangement. (Easy!)

If you want to link to your own artist page / your portfolio, instead of using the usual URL (pond5.com/artist/username), use this:
http://www.pond5.com/user/username
(where "username" = you)

That way, anybody clicking through to that URL, and then signing up for an account with us, will be one of your "referees" - you will earn 5% for everything they buy or sell, for a year.

If you want to link to the main page, and not to your artist page, use this URL:
http://www.pond5.com/?referrer=username

As you can see, these two types of referral URL are formatted differently, which is what Marcus was explaining so, er, eloquently. That and some other stuff I didn't really understand...

Anyway, FEAR NOT! We will have a shiny new simplified way of doing the referral stuff very soon!

[note to Marcus: pöss ;)]


-Tom

Marcus, don't worry, I had absolutely no trouble understanding your explanation. :)

(Did I just give away one of my other sources of income...?)

http://www.pond5.com/index.php?ref=USER this link workingfor referral?
can't find link to subscribe to forum post.