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During our Frequent Miler team meeting last week, we were discussing the Amex Platinum and Amex Gold referral threads we have in the Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group and thought it would be fun to calculate how many points readers have likely earned since we set up those threads.
By genuinely super-convenient happenstance, it’s been a year to the day since we set up the first of a few referral threads for readers to share their Amex Platinum referral links. It was about 1.5 months after that when we started our first Amex Gold referral thread.
We’ve since inserted a different reader’s referral link on our Best Offers page every single day so that they’ll earn bonus Membership Rewards when someone signs up for an Amex Platinum or Amex Gold card. By my rough calculations, that means Frequent Miler Insiders members have earned 30 million Membership Rewards between them over the course of the last year without any effort beyond leaving a Facebook comment.
Let’s back up a little though to explain what’s been going on in case you’re confused by what I’m chatting about. On our Best Credit Card Offers page, we have links to the highest signup bonuses available for every card. If the highest offer has an affiliate link, we use that. If the highest offer doesn’t have an affiliate link, we use that even though it costs us money by not displaying an inferior offer for which there is an affiliate link. And if the highest offer is only available via a referral link, we use that.
In the case of Amex Platinum and Amex Gold cards, for the last year or so the best welcome offers have only been publicly available via referral offers. You might occasionally be targeted for a better offer via email, in your Amex Offers, in different browsers, etc., but the only way to guarantee you’ll get that higher offer has been to apply when using someone’s referral link who, themselves, have been targeted.
That latter part is key. At the moment the best offer for the personal Amex Platinum card is 150,000 Membership Rewards after $6,000 spend in 6 months, while the Amex Gold best offer is 90,000 Membership Rewards after $4,000 spend in 6 months. Not everyone can refer to those offers though. On the Frequent Miler team, it’s only Greg who’s able to generate the 150k Platinum offer.
Up until very recently, you were limited to earning 55,000 Membership Rewards via referrals per card you’re referring from. Both the Platinum and Gold offers provided 30,000 Membership Rewards for the referrer which meant they’d max out their earnings with only two referrals. It seems like most days at least two people apply for an Amex Platinum card and at least two people apply for an Amex Gold card through our Best Offers page. That means referrals get maxed out quickly and so there’s no benefit for Greg to have his Amex Platinum referral link sitting there on the Best Offers page.
As a result, we set up referral threads on Facebook for both the Platinum and Gold cards for readers to share their referral links. Each day since then I’ve gone through and switched out the links on the Best Offers page.
The Math
Based on reader comments after their referral link was used, it seems like referrals have often gotten maxed out (i.e. they earned 55,000 Membership Rewards). I imagine there’ll be the odd occasion though where they’ll have only picked up one – or possibly zero – referrals, but I’ve assumed those are a minority of cases. As a somewhat realistic guesstimate, I’ve assumed that readers have earned an average of 45,000 Membership Rewards each day on each of the referral threads.
The Amex Platinum referral threads have been around for 365 days, while the Amex Gold threads have been around for 320 days. Based on the guesstimated 45k earnings per day per thread:
- Platinum: 45,000 * 365 = 16,425,000 Membership Rewards
- Gold: 45,000 * 320 = 14,400,000 Membership Rewards
- Total = 30,825,000 Membership Rewards
More than 30 million Membership Rewards earned and the total could be even higher than that if the 45,000 assumption per day is lower than reality. Our Reasonable Redemption Value for Membership Rewards is 1.55cpp; if that’s what you value those points at, it means we’ve helped readers earn almost $500,000 worth of points over the past year from those two referral threads alone which is pretty awesome!
How To Share Your Referral Links
If you weren’t aware of the existence of these referral threads, please feel free to add your eligible link(s) to those threads if you’ve not done that before. Amex Platinum referral links have to provide the 150k welcome offer all the time and Amex Gold links have to provide the 90k offer all the time, not just in incognito mode. One way to help verify if that’s the case is that to the best of my knowledge eligible referral links earn 30k Membership Rewards for the referrer, plus it states that the person applying will earn 150k/90k for the Platinum and Gold cards respectively.
On the Platinum referral thread, please leave your comment as a reply to Tim’s initial comment on the thread, not as a regular comment as those will get removed. It’s a similar setup on the Gold referral thread, but in that case please leave your comment as a reply to Nick’s initial comment.
To help ensure things are fair for all readers, please don’t leave your link if you’ve already left it on the thread – whether it’s been used yet or not – as we’re removing duplicate links. Seeing as it’s a new year, we know that referral limits have reset, so once we’ve worked our way through all the current reader referral links, we’ll set up new referral threads for people to share their links that were used last year but have since reset.
- Amex Platinum Referral Thread – leave your referral link as a reply to Tim’s comment
- Amex Gold Referral Thread – leave your referral link as a reply to Nick’s comment
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For users who do not have Facebook and are not allowed to have Facebook is there any other options? I have a great 200K MR point link but no where to post it but Reddit and no one likes me there 🙁 Please help!
I’m afraid not at the moment – Facebook is the only channel we accept referral links from. If it’s any consolation, there aren’t any referral threads open at the moment for Amex cards.
Thanks for taking the time to reply. While I have you here, do you know if there will be a live ask us anything this week with the holiday or is it postponed.
Thanks
Ian
We are planning to have one on Wednesday, but Greg won’t be able to make it – it’ll be the other four of us.
This is excellent news!! Thank you so much. I’m looking forward to.
Hello
I see the 150K + $200 referral offer on my account, However, it shows in regular on a windows PC, and incognito on Mac. So, can’t figure out if I should add it to the referral thread or not
If you only see that higher offer sometimes, we wouldn’t be able to use that unfortunately.
Are there currently any threads? Just got the ability to do referrals but it looks like the threads are closed? Or maybe my Facebook skills are poor.
Yes, new and better offers appeared that give 150k + $200 on the Platinum card and 90k + $200 on the Gold card. Here are the two new referral threads:
Platinum – https://www.facebook.com/groups/frequentmiler/posts/1250991248834488/?comment_id=1250991428834470
Gold – https://www.facebook.com/groups/frequentmiler/posts/1250993745500905/?comment_id=1250993935500886
Awesome! Thanks Stephen. I finally get to do one.
Do you have other referral threads or just amex gold/plt?
I’m afraid not – only these two threads.
Nick, I just posted on one of your threads above. Can you check if I did it correctly
This is awesome but also makes me sad. Nothing I do seems to get me off the pop up list for personal cards (they LURVE me for biz tho, so grateful for that)
Anyway thanks for setting this up for the readers who are eligible, that’s super!
Maybe a dumb question, but any reason why I dont see referral options for personal platinum or gold (i have both)? When I land on the refer a friend page I see options for all three of my Hilton cards and my Marriott card (all personal) but neither of the membership rewards cards.
Not a dumb question. I used to be able to refer from my Amex Gold card, but that option disappeared a year or two ago and I’ve no idea why.
The referral link is not restricted to the card it was generated for, you can browse all other cards , Mine shows 75K Gold instead of 60K for example
I’m just now finding out about this, two weeks after I canceled both my Amex Platinum and Gold. DOUBLE OUCH. I lost the ability to refer to any of these offers, as the indirect ones from my other cards are not competitive (80k Platinum), although I have been targeted for the new 100k MR referral limit.
I have other popular Amex cards (Green/Delta Plat/Delta Gold/Hilton Surpass/BBP/Amex EDP), will you have a place to post those referral links?
It’s unlikely that we’ll be taking referral links on those other cards I’m afraid.
Why not biz cards? do they not have the limit?
The biz cards don’t always provide the 150k personal Platinum or 90k personal Gold referral links, so we’re not able to use them. They also don’t always provide a higher bonus for that particular business card either and so we’re not able to use those on the Best Offers page.
I would like to personally thank you at Frequent Miler for this – I got 110,000 AMEX MR points last year thanks to you!!! Like you said, all for just a couple of clicks and a quick copy/paste. Keep up the good work, and please feel free to use my links again this year too!
Awesome, glad you maxed out your referrals on those cards last year 🙂
can you please also find a way to help out people who refuse to support Facebook?
I completely understand that some people don’t use Facebook, but it’s the easiest way for us to manage this.
Hopefully FM will consider another platform. I also refuse to use/support Facebook.
Same here, won’t use Facebook, would love to see FM on a different platform.
Thanks for the feedback. I get it. In this case, it’s the easiest platform for this and while we’re very happy to help readers earn millions of free points, we’re not going to add the complication of collecting, organizing, and managing sets of links through multiple sources / platforms. Not every deal works for everyone. The good news is that if you’re in a multi player household, it is pretty easy to earn a chunk of points referring each other for new cards.
As a personal example that is very different but yet parallels this, my parents refused to sign up for Facebook from the beginning because they had no interest in social media. I totally respect and understand their choice on that, but the trade off is that they don’t see a lot of photos that my wife and I post of our travels. Yes, we could separately upload everything to some other site and / or send individual photos to them, but we just don’t often have or take the time to double up on the photo organization and loading.
In this case, our FB group is a place where readers can organize the thread on their own by leaving their links as per the instructions on the post and then the links are just automatically organized in a single list that we can work our way down every day and it’s easy to see if the same person reposts their link, etc, so that’s where we’re doing this. Different strokes for different folks.
Wow great idea. I had no idea you guys were doing this. Yet another reason you’re the best and most ethical blog around! I’ll add my link and keep my fingers crossed. Thanks! Cheers!
Oh I see this is for the non-Biz Plat. I can get to the 150k Personal Plat via my referral link but it doesn’t go there directly (which I assume you’d want for clarity on your site). Any way I can modify the link to go direct to the 150k personal plat from my base referral link?
Those kind of referral links unfortunately don’t always provide the 150k offer and so we can’t use them.
To expand on this, yes it is possible to create a direct link to the consumer Platinum card, but as Stephen said, it won’t produce the 150K offer every time (believe me, I wish it would because then we would use all of the Amex cards on the FM team to produce them!). You might open your business Platinum link 20 times and see the 150K consumer Platinum offer through it and think that it’ll show that offer every time, but if you open it in enough browsers and/or different devices (like cell phones, tablets, etc), it’ll eventually not show the 150K offer. That’s something we learned through enough experience and experimentation.
We therefore only use those offers where in your Amex login (rather than only after clicking the link) it says that your friend will get 150K points — which means only from your consumer Platinum card that has been targeted to give out that specific offer. That is unfortunately targeted (I think my wife and I have 4 consumer Platinum cards between us and we manage another for a family member and none of us have been targeted with that 150K referral offer).
But if you’re looking to share your link with a friend and you want to make it easy for them to apply for the specific card you want, what you do is click through your own referral link (it sounds like from your Business Platinum card if I’m understanding your comment correctly). Then click where it says to view other cards with a referral offer and personal cards and navigate to the card they want. Let’s say they want the Hilton Surpass. Click on the Hilton Surpass and then you can copy the URL from the address bar in your browswer. It’ll be super long, but if they click that URL it’ll open directly to the Surpass card and you’ll get the referral credit if they use it and they are approved.
So that’s how you can create a direct link to the specific card — but like I said, on these 150K Platinum / 90K links, if you don’t have a Platinum card or Gold card that specifically advertises the 150K / 90K offer within your Amex login, it’s unfortunately not going to be 100% consistent and we obviously want anyone clicking through to get the offer we’re displaying, so we don’t use those self-generated links on the Platinum and Gold cards. On other cards we do because the referral offer is reliably the same every time, but with the Platinum and Gold cards the situation is different.
I hope that helps add a bit more detail without being as confusing as it feels like it sounds.
Thanks for the super-detailed response! Totally understand, we gotta have vanilla links for the vanilla cards! Still think its awesome you guys did the link-phishing for us! 30MM miles adds up to quite a bit of happy people. Cheers:).
Just wanted to also say thank you Nick for being so detailed in your response!
Happy New Year BTW!