What are Distributors?

A distributor tracks collaborator performance over time and creates obligations on a schedule rather than on every sale. Unlike programs, which fire the moment a customer converts, a distributor accumulates data across a tracking period and then pays out in a batch when the period ends.

This opens up reward structures that programs can’t express. Anything that depends on aggregate performance (leaderboards, bonuses, profit shares, revenue splits) needs a distributor because the reward can’t be calculated until the period is over.

When to use a distributor

A distributor is the right tool whenever you can answer three questions: what measurable thing are you tracking, how much are you paying for it, and on what schedule should the payout happen? If you can define all three, you can build a distributor around it.

The two most common shapes are profit shares and bonuses. A profit share pays collaborators a cut of revenue based on their contribution to a period, like a course platform paying creators a share of subscription revenue based on how many students completed their courses. The content creator profit share recipe is a working example. A bonus pays out to top performers, like rewarding the affiliate who drove the most sales last month. The monthly sales bonus recipe shows how that’s built.

The lifecycle of a distribution

Distribution structures

A distribution structure defines who gets paid when a distribution triggers, and how the reward pool is divided among the winners. See Distribution Structures for the available structures and how to pick one.

Tracking events and metric scores

Distributors measure collaborator activity through engagement triggers. Each distributor is configured with the event types it cares about, and each event type has a configurable point value. As events fire during the tracking period, Siren accumulates a metric score for each collaborator by adding up the points from every qualifying event.

If a distributor tracks both course completions and lesson completions, you might weight course completions at 10 points and lesson completions at 1 point. A collaborator whose students complete 5 courses and 20 lessons during the period ends up with a score of 70. When the distribution triggers, that score is what the distribution structure uses to decide what the collaborator is owed.

The full list of engagement triggers distributors can track (course completions, product sales, blog post visits, coupon uses, site visits, and more) lives in the engagement trigger reference. Site Visited is a good starting point if you want to see how a single trigger is documented.

For developers: Distributors fire a set of events across their lifecycle. See the distribution events reference for the full pipeline.