Activity Clauses: When Lifetime Revshare Stops Paying

"Lifetime" is the most repeated word in revenue-share marketing. Cloudbet Affiliates promises lifetime commissions on all the players you refer. Duelbits Partners says that as long as the player plays, you earn a cut: "Money for life". Playattack's FAQ says the program pays a lifetime revenue share. All three are describing how long a referred player keeps paying. None of that language describes what you have to keep doing for the payments to continue, and that is decided by a different set of clauses: activity clauses. They are short, easy to skip, and they decide what a lifetime deal pays the month you slow down.

Three kinds of activity clause

Inactivity definitions

10bet Partners' terms define an Inactive Affiliate as one that has not logged into its account for ninety consecutive days, or has not generated a minimum of five new customers in any three consecutive calendar months. Two separate tests, and failing either one is enough. The login test is trivial to pass with a calendar reminder. The volume test is not, and the next section works out why. The definition alone does not say what follows from it, so find the clause that uses the term before you plan a quiet quarter.

Quotas for the first payment

Cloudbet's FAQ requires affiliates to refer a minimum of five active customers within a three-month period of joining in order to receive their first revenue-share payment. Playattack sets its first-payout threshold at one FTD, and its terms also let it hold a new affiliate's profit for up to three calendar months. Both are reasonable from the program's side: they filter out sign-ups that never send a player. From your side, they decide when the first money arrives and whether it arrives at all.

Rate drops for quiet months

Cloudbet pays a 25% default, and a lower tier of 10% applies after three months with no first-time depositor. That is a ladder with one step pointing down: the rate on your whole existing book falls because new acquisition stopped. Playattack's carryover clause works on the same principle from another angle. Its negative balances are set to zero at the end of the period, but the reset needs five FTDs in that period; below that, the no-negative-carryover protection does not apply. A quiet month costs you the protection as well as the new players.

The quota arithmetic for a small site

Five new customers in three months sounds like nothing. For a small site it is a coin toss. Suppose a site sends one program enough traffic to produce 1.6 new customers a month on average: twenty clicks a month at an 8% click-to-customer rate, for example. Over a quarter that averages 4.8, comfortably close to five.

Averages hide the problem. If customers arrive independently of each other at that average rate, the number in any quarter follows a Poisson distribution with a mean of 4.8. The chance of four or fewer is:

e^(−4.8) × (1 + 4.8 + 4.8^2/2 + 4.8^3/6 + 4.8^4/24) = 0.00823 × (1 + 4.8 + 11.52 + 18.43 + 22.12) = 0.00823 × 57.87 = 0.476

A 47.6% chance of missing the quota in any single quarter, at an average that looks safe. And 10bet's test runs on any three consecutive calendar months, so over a year there are ten overlapping windows, each one another chance to fall short. To bring a single quarter's miss probability under 10%, the average has to reach about eight new customers a quarter, two thirds more than the site in the example produces.

The same arithmetic applies to Cloudbet's first-payment quota. A new site producing one active customer a month has a mean of three over its first three months. The chance of five or more is 1 − e^(−3) × (1 + 3 + 4.5 + 4.5 + 3.375) = 1 − 0.0498 × 16.375 = 0.185. Fewer than one new site in five at that pace clears the bar. The FAQ states the requirement, not what happens to a balance earned by an affiliate who misses it; that is worth asking before you join, not after.

The traffic-to-revenue estimator gives you the expected monthly count from your own clicks and conversion rate. Treat that number as a mean and ask how often a quarter falls below the quota, not whether the mean clears it.

What a quiet quarter costs on a mature book

The rate-drop clause bites hardest on an established account, because it applies to revenue you have already built. Take an illustrative account with 150 active referred players producing EUR 3,000 of net revenue a month. At Cloudbet's 25% default that pays EUR 750 a month.

Now the site stops acquiring for three months: a redesign, a migration, an illness, a Google update that wipes out a traffic source. The existing players keep playing, so revenue holds at EUR 3,000. After three months with no first-time depositor, the 10% tier applies and the same revenue pays EUR 300. Every further month without a new depositor costs EUR 450 against the default rate, on players who were already paid for in content and time.

The published tiers describe the drop. How fast the rate returns after the next depositor arrives is a question for the program. If it returns the following month, a single depositor at the start of the fourth month is worth EUR 450 on top of their own play. If it returns only after a further qualifying period, a quiet quarter costs more than a quarter.

Clauses with a clock on them

Some activity clauses are about paperwork rather than players. Metal Casino Affiliates' terms have affiliates send an invoice each month, and clause 10.6 states that invoices older than one year from the date of issue will not be paid. An unpaid invoice that sits in a drafts folder for twelve months becomes worthless, whatever the traffic behind it earned. Programs that self-bill do not carry this risk in the same form; programs that wait for your invoice do. The invoicing side is covered in getting paid: invoicing, VAT and thresholds.

Holds are the other clock. Playattack's right to hold a new affiliate's profit for up to three calendar months means the first quarter's earnings may not arrive until the fourth month. Budget for that before you count on the money.

What to settle before you plan time off

• Does the agreement define an inactive affiliate, and what happens to an account that meets the definition: lower rate, frozen balance, closure?
• Is there a minimum count of new customers or depositors per period, and is the period fixed or rolling?
• Does the rate on existing players depend on new acquisition?
• Does any protection, such as a carryover reset, depend on a minimum count?
• Is there a deadline for invoicing or claiming a balance?
• Can a new affiliate's earnings be held, and for how long?

Most of these can be raised with a program manager without any awkwardness, and a written answer is worth more than the clause's wording. The approach is in working with your affiliate manager.

What we would do this week

1. For each program you work with, find the clauses that mention inactivity, minimum activity or a deadline, and list them in one place with the period each one runs over.
2. Take your average monthly count of new customers for each program and work out the chance of a quarter below any quota it carries.
3. Set a recurring reminder to log into every affiliate account at least once a month, and another to send any invoice the month it falls due.
4. If a break is coming, ask the manager in writing how the account is treated while acquisition pauses, before the pause starts.