Getting paid to bring an audience to someone else's event

Three different things get called the same thing. A per-event commission pays you on tickets you sell for a host and is funded from their proceeds. An affiliate share pays a slice of the platform fee when organizers you referred make sales. Referral credit pays advertising credit, not cash, when someone signs up.

Three programs, three very different payouts

People use affiliate and referral interchangeably and then get confused about why the money is nothing like what they expected. The distinction matters, because one of the three can pay meaningfully and two of them mostly cannot.

Read the rate column carefully. The first row is a real percentage of a ticket price. The second is one percent of five percent, which is about 0.05 percent of what somebody sells.

Per-event commission, the one worth pursuing

A host turns it on for their event and decides the rate. You share a link, and you are paid on each paid ticket that arrives through it.

The mechanic that makes this reasonable to everyone is where the money comes from. It is deducted from the host's proceeds rather than added to the buyer's total, so nobody pays extra because you were involved. The host is choosing to give up margin in exchange for attendance they would not otherwise have had.

That framing is also the pitch. You are not asking for a favour, you are offering a trade, and hosts respond much better to a specific claim about how many people you can bring than to a general offer to help promote.

Be conservative about the number you promise. A host who expected forty and got twelve will not run it with you again, and this route depends entirely on repeat relationships.

Affiliate revenue share, and its actual size

This pays when organizers you referred sell tickets. The rate is one percent of the platform service fee, which is itself five percent, and it runs for twelve months from the referral.

Worked through: an organizer who sells 5,000 dollars of tickets in their first year generates 250 dollars of platform fee, of which your share is about 2.50 dollars. There is a 25 dollar minimum payout and a 30-day hold.

So it takes roughly ten organizers at that level, or one substantially larger one, before a payout clears at all. It is funded by the platform rather than taken from the organizer, which is the point of the design: referring somebody costs them nothing.

Treat it as something that accrues if you already know a lot of people who run events. It is not a reason to go looking for some.

Referral credit is not cash

The invite program pays 50 dollars in advertising credit when someone signs up through your link, capped at ten credited signups in any rolling 30 days.

That credit can only be spent on promotions inside the platform. It has no cash value and it is not paid out, which makes it genuinely useful if you run events and want to promote them, and worth nothing at all if you do not.

Judge it accordingly. For an active organizer it is a real subsidy on promotion. For somebody with an audience and no events of their own, it is not income.

Disclosure is not optional

If you earn on a link, say so where you share it. This is a requirement rather than a matter of style, and the wording is fixed rather than left to you to phrase.

• Disclose in the same message as the link, not in a bio or a pinned post somewhere else.
• Disclose every time, including in a group chat and including to people who already know.
• Do not bury it. A disclosure at the end of a long post that nobody reaches has not been made.
• Do not imply you have no interest. Saying you just thought this looked good while earning on it is the specific thing the rule exists to prevent.

In practice disclosure costs you almost nothing. Audiences respond badly to discovering an undisclosed arrangement and barely react to a disclosed one, so the calculation is not close.

How attribution actually works

Most disputes about commission are really disputes about attribution, and they are avoidable if you understand the mechanism before you start rather than after a payout looks wrong.

A link credits you when somebody follows it and then buys. If they see your post, close it, and search for the event two days later, that sale is not attributed to you even though you caused it. This is the single biggest gap between what promoters feel they delivered and what they are paid for.

You can narrow the gap. Send the link directly rather than mentioning the event and letting people find it. Make the link the only obvious way to act. And ask the host what their total was, so you can see your attributed share against real attendance rather than guessing.

The affiliate program works on a longer window, tracking sales by a referred organizer for twelve months from the referral. There is also a hold before payouts release, which exists because refunds and chargebacks arrive after the sale does.

What these programs will not do

Where to start

Find one host running something your people would actually go to. Ask whether they pay a commission on tickets brought in through a link, tell them honestly how many you think you can move, and disclose it when you share.

One event tells you what your reach converts at, which is the single most useful number you can have. Everything else, including whether any of this is worth your time, follows from it.