A referral program of some kind essential, but TITAN makes it a bit difficult.
I was wondering, what if TITAN wasn't automatically enabled, but could be purchased? E.g. 50bitUSD or maybe more e.g. 500bitUSD?. That may even help it sound like more of a feature. That way the affiliate would still get the TITAN fee if the referral paid it immediately before depositing/transacting large funds, and could be a source of income for the DAC in non-referred users.
A rewards program could be in place for those who sign up any user (merchants, savers, spenders, forex traders, investors, etc). Affiliates would earn their transaction volume fees. Refer a user and whatever happens you get their fees or a big cut of their fees such as 50%, or if the referral pays to enable TITAN then the affiliate could get 100% of the TITAN fee and the transaction fees would then become unknown and go to the DAC.
This would mean it could all happen automatically within the system.
No dilution required to pay for it, apart from the initial cost of coding it. No delegates required to run it. It just runs itself once it's coded in.
Put simply
Affiliate gets a "download wallet referral link" with their username in the URL generated from within the Bitshares client. If a wallet is downloaded from that URL any new accounts set up from it are the affiliates referrals. All users can easily generate this link and become affiliates. Who's the download hosted by? I don't know, bitshares.org?
Affiliates earn the fees of their referrals
TITAN makes this not possible to track I think
Allow users to pay to enable TITAN
New type of fees from TITAN are burnt and profit the DAC, or if the user was referred they are sent to the affiliate.
Even more simply: Generate referral link from within the client. Earn the fees of whoever signs up via your link.
Its just an idea, maybe the fees wont be enough of an incentive.