Lately, I’ve been seeing YouTube creators promote not just discounts, but exclusive ones — lines like “this discount is only available through my link.”
Apparently, everyone already knows that the real price of your first VPN month, your first therapy session in Yasno, or your first English lesson at Skyeng is lower than the following ones.
So we end up with this slightly ridiculous setup where everyone knows the price isn’t really €30, it’s €25 — and everyone knows that everyone knows it. Which means companies have to get even more creative. The thing is, dropping from 30 to 25 already changed your unit economics, and that price was probably calculated just to cover operational costs — without accounting for UA.
So your first lesson, session, or month might not make the company any money, but at least it won’t lose money either.
And then it gets funnier.
When you type in a promo code like CHUZHOY or MAKSIM20, the company can track its marketing campaign performance. Sometimes the creator’s earnings even depend on how many people used their specific code. So everyone in this system benefits from attribution through promo codes — except for the only group that doesn’t care: consumers, who would much rather just pay less, especially since that “less” is basically the same everywhere.
At this point — in conditions close to perfect competition (between creators fighting for attention with identical discounts) — companies have to offer actual discounts.
But we already reached the point where the product unit itself sits at zero margin.
Now the company has to put extra load on its servers, pay the teacher or therapist for their time, and somehow still fight for you.
Puh-puh-puh.
That’s why those additional discounts look so absurd: not 20% but 21%! Not 50% but 52%!
As a consumer, you’re basically dipping your hand directly into the advertiser’s pocket.
It seems to me that once price wars begin in a near-perfect competition, the model becomes unstable. Which means there’s still some piece of pie left somewhere in the influencer-marketing space — if only I were smart enough to figure out how to grab it.