Why We Built Two Payment Models (And When Each One Actually Works)

The Problem We Inherited From Affiliate Marketing

When we started building Rippl, I looked at every referral platform I could find. Most of them operated on a single model: you only earned money when a sale happened. Click the link, drive traffic, but if the visitor doesn't convert, you get nothing. The math felt harsh to community promoters who were delivering real audience attention.

The issue is that traditional affiliate networks were designed around anonymous cookies and mass-market traffic. You couldn't prove who sent the visitor or how much trust was involved. So platforms had to wait for the purchase to verify anything happened at all.

But our promoters aren't anonymous. They're Telegram admins with 5,000 members who know each other by name. WhatsApp group owners running tight communities. Discord moderators with actual credibility. When someone shares a link in those spaces, trust is already there. The click itself carries weight. We realised we didn't have to make people wait for a sale to prove their value.

Pay-Per-Verified-Click: When Attention Is the Win

CPC campaigns work like this: a brand sets a price per click. Your promoter generates a trackable link from inside Rippl, shares it in their community, and gets paid every time someone clicks it. No purchase required. No friction.

This model makes sense for brands doing awareness work. A new app wants downloads. A SaaS company is building a user base. A local business needs foot traffic. The brand's goal isn't immediate revenue; it's reach into a community that actually exists, not just scrolling past ads on a crowded feed.

We track the click with verification built in. The promoter can see in their earnings dashboard exactly how many clicks they've generated, when they happened, and what the payout totals. It's transparent. Last month, one of our Pro tier promoters ran a CPC campaign for a language app and pulled in £180 across four weeks, just by sharing the link weekly in her study Discord server. She wasn't selling anything; she was introducing a tool her community might find useful.

The anti-fraud side matters too. We verify clicks so a brand doesn't pay for bot traffic or the same person clicking five times. That verification happens automatically, and the promoter never has to think about it.

Pay-Per-Action: Aligning Risk With Genuine Conversion

CPA campaigns flip the equation. The brand only pays when someone clicks the link and then completes an action. That action might be signing up, making a purchase, applying for a job, or whatever conversion matters to the brand. The promoter earns per result, not per click.

CPA attracts brands that have real conversion paths and need to measure actual business outcomes. An e-commerce brand selling a specific product. A course platform tracking enrollments. A job board counting applications. These are situations where traffic alone doesn't pay the bills.

The promoter's incentive shifts too. With CPC, you're paid for the click; with CPA, you're paid for the outcome. A smart promoter running a CPA campaign will share links with the people in their community most likely to take action. They'll explain why the product matters. They'll vouch for it. That's not because we force them to; it's because they only earn when something happens.

We track conversions the same way we track clicks: with built-in verification. The brand's system talks to Rippl, and we know when a click led to a conversion. No cookies. No waiting days for attribution. It's immediate and auditable.

The Honest Tension Between Them

Here's what I won't pretend: CPA campaigns often pay less per result than CPC pays per click. A CPC campaign might offer £0.50 per click. A CPA campaign might offer £5 per sale. The denominator changes. You're no longer measuring clicks; you're measuring conversions, and there are always fewer conversions than clicks.

That's not a design flaw; it's how performance marketing actually works. A brand paying per result is taking on conversion risk. If the link drives 100 clicks and 2 people buy, the brand is paying for 2 actions, not 100 clicks. The promoter's payout reflects that.

For promoters, the choice often comes down to certainty versus upside. CPC is more predictable. You know roughly how many clicks you'll generate from a community share, so you can forecast earnings. CPA is higher variance. If your community skews toward ready-to-buy people, you might earn more per share. If it skews toward lookers, you earn less.

We see promoters run both. Some dedicate one community to CPC campaigns and another to CPA. Some run a CPA campaign for a brand they genuinely love and a CPC campaign for brand awareness work. The dashboard shows earnings for each type, so it's easy to compare over time and see which model suits your audience.

Why Community Changes Everything

The thing that convinced me we needed both models wasn't theory. It was watching how different communities actually work.

A Telegram group for cryptocurrency traders will click a finance app link and often sign up or deposit quickly. CPA makes sense there; the promoter earns based on real action. But a WhatsApp group for parents doesn't expect conversion pressure. Someone shares an app for kids' learning, the parents click out of curiosity, most don't download, a few do. CPC fits better because it rewards the promoter for sharing something relevant, even if most people just browse.

The brand's goal matters too. If you're Shopify and you want to reach small business owners in niche communities, you probably care about people who actually sign up for a trial. CPA. If you're a podcast platform just trying to get in front of people who listen to podcasts, CPC might be all you need to measure success.

Neither model is better. They're answers to different questions. We built both because the real world doesn't fit a single payment structure, and we didn't want to force brands or promoters into a mold that didn't match what they were actually trying to do.