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Lets call this relationship “author alignment”.  When you get it right, you will occasionally get unicorns.

we provided our creators with the opportunity to earn royalties of $0.10 to $0.50 for unique visitors they moved to our branded sites over a three month window, with a cap on total performance.

Given incentives, the average influencer moved an average of ~500 additional monthly visitors to their content.

It became clear that one secret of the unicorns, the most effective and consistent influencers, was creating a kind of promotional permanence.

“being huge on Twitter” doesn’t truly equate to influence. The ephemeral nature of social media, and the incentives of the social media platform owners, means that even the biggest social media audience doesn’t  translate into an audience for the content an influencer creates. Promotional permanence is what drives outsized results, which means alignment is critical.

intangible incentives such as Autonomy, Reputation, and Mastery are fundamental to creating content that rises above the merely “good enough” for influencers

we have found that “unpaid influencer” costs often outpace the costs of the compensated approach due to missed deadlines, recruiting challenges, concessions to author autonomy, and mismatched expectations about the value exchange..

once tangible incentives are involved,  intangible incentives tend to be quickly forgotten.  Once a price is established, many marketers ignore intangibles completely, assuming the relationship more closely resembles the paid freelancer.

we have found that combining tangible and intangible incentives leads to a result that delivers substantial incremental value (an audience worth $200-$400 per article) over 90% of the time.