How to make money with GoCDKeys: the Partner Programme explained

Most affiliate programmes for games work the same way: you recommend a shop, someone buys, and weeks later you find out whether the sale stuck. Our Partner Programme does not work like that. You get paid when a person you sent to GoCDKeys clicks through to a shop. Whether they buy or not is not your problem.

This is the whole thing, from opening an account to receiving the money.

What you get paid

0.05 € for every user who arrives through your link, hits "View deal" and goes through to one of the shops we list.

That is the entire rule. There is no commission on sales, no cookie that has to survive until checkout, no shop confirming anything a month later. The click to the shop goes through our system and it is counted against your identifier on the spot.

Two limits worth knowing before you do any maths:

• It counts once per user per day. If someone opens five shops comparing a game, that is one, not five.
• It counts once per IP address per day too. Three browsers, one person, one count.

Attribution: 15 days

Whoever arrives through your link keeps counting for you for 15 days from that first visit. If they come back on their own three days later and go to a shop, it is still yours.

Two details people get wrong:

• Coming back through your link again does not restart the clock. Fifteen days from the first visit, full stop.
• A user already attributed to another partner is not taken away from them. First link in wins.

Step by step

1. Create a GoCDKeys account. It is free and takes a few seconds with Google or Steam. Without an account there is no panel and no stats, so there is nowhere to put your earnings.

2. Apply from the programme page. It is at gocdkeys.com/partner-program. No minimum following, no exclusivity, and you can run other programmes at the same time.

3. Wait for approval. We approve every application by hand, usually in under 24 hours. This is not us being slow, it is us keeping fraudulent accounts out. Your link appears in the panel the moment we approve it, not before, so do not go looking for it while the application is still open.

4. Copy your link. It looks like this:

gocdkeys.com/#ref=yourid

5. Put it where you already talk about games. The important part, and the part almost nobody notices at first: #ref=yourid works stuck onto the end of any page on the site. Not just the home page.

gocdkeys.com/buy-hollow-knight-pc-cd-key#ref=yourid

So if your video is about one game, send people to that game's page, not to the front door. They land on the comparison for the thing you just spent ten minutes talking about, they hit "View deal", it counts. A link to the home page asks them to search for it themselves, and a good share of them will not.

6. Tag your links. Add a label and you find out which content actually earns:

gocdkeys.com/#ref=yourid&c=my-video

There is no limit on tags. One per video, one per stream, one per Discord channel, one per pinned comment. After two weeks the panel tells you where your money comes from, and it is rarely where you assumed.

The panel

Inside your account, under My account › Partner, and in full at gocdkeys.com/partner-panel. It shows:

• Users to shop per day, and per game, per shop and per country.
• What was not counted, and the reason it was not. No black box.
• Your balance, and a CSV export if you want to do your own maths.
• Five ready-to-paste links for the games featured on the GoCDKeys front page: the most searched ones and the releases coming up. They rotate daily, which saves you the job of deciding what to link this week.

Getting the money out

• Minimum 50 €. Below that the button does not appear.
• You request the payout from the panel, and only one request can be open at a time.
• Then you send an invoice for that amount to hello@gocdkeys.com, with your tax details and your partner ID.
• We pay by bank transfer or PayPal within 15 days of receiving it.
• If you change your payout account, whether IBAN or PayPal, payouts go on hold for 7 days. That one protects your own account.

Say this part plainly, because it is where people get stuck: without an invoice there is no payment. We cannot pay an invoice that does not exist. If you cannot issue invoices where you live, talk to us before you start piling up a balance.

What does not count, and why

We would rather tell you now than argue about it when you are looking at a number you did not expect.

Not counted:

• Bots and automated traffic.
• The same user going to a shop more than once on the same day.
• Your own clicks: not from the IP address you signed up with, and not from the browser or the IP addresses you open your panel from. Yes, that means testing your own link does not pay you.

There is also a daily cap. Every partner has a ceiling of paid users per day, starting at 50 and growing with your average over the last seven days. Anything above it is not paid automatically: we check it by hand and payouts pause in the meantime. If one of your videos takes off, write to us and we will look at it.

Not allowed at all:

• Bought traffic.
• Incentivising the click ("click here and I'll give you X").
• Clicking your own link.
• Hiding that it is an affiliate link.
• Masking where the link goes.
• Bidding on our brand in ads.
• Spam.

Manipulating the measurement means the account is cancelled and the balance is not paid. That is the one hard line.

What you can realistically expect

Here is an example with round numbers, so you can see the shape of it:

Not everyone who lands clicks through to a shop, and the ratio moves depending on what you link. A video about one specific game sending people to that game's page converts better than a general "check out this site" in a description nobody reads.

The honest version: a small channel takes months to reach 50 €. If you send 300 visits a month you are looking at most of a year before the payout button lights up. That is not a reason not to sign up, since neither the balance nor the link expires, but anyone telling you a small channel monetises fast is selling you something.

What actually moves the needle is a release. One video about a game people are about to buy, linking to that game's page, does more in a week than a footer link does in six months.

Why recommending the comparison is easier than recommending a shop

This is the part that matters if you care about your audience, and you should.

When you recommend a specific shop, your credibility is attached to that shop behaving well. It delivers a dead key, someone gets a refund fight, and that is your problem in your comments, not theirs.

When you recommend the comparison, you are recommending 49 verified shops, price history, and a straight answer on whether today is a good day to buy or whether waiting is smarter. You are not telling anyone where to buy. You are handing them the information to decide.

And the link does not age. A video from eight months ago still points at whatever the best price is today, not at some dead offer from the week you recorded it. Old content keeps earning, which is a lot more than most affiliate links can say.

Get started

Create your account, apply at gocdkeys.com/partner-program, and once you are approved, stick #ref=yourid onto the page of the next game you talk about.

Luis Abrines

I have been a gamer for as long as I can remember, and for the last 14 years I have been making life easier for other gamers. CEO and co-founder of Gocdkeys.

LinkedIn profile More about Luis Abrines