Transformation of the Customer Acquisition Economy and the Redistribution of Marketing Rents Between Platforms and Creators: From Auction-Based Advertising to Performance Commissions

Citation: Nurmukhambet Yernur, "Transformation of the Customer Acquisition Economy and the Redistribution of Marketing Rents Between Platforms and Creators: From Auction-Based Advertising to Performance Commissions", Universal Library of Business and Economics, Volume 02, Issue 02.

Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This paper examines a structural transformation in the global electronic commerce ecosystem. The transformation consists in a shift in advertising monetization from auction based payment for exposure, including CPC and CPM, to mechanisms in which remuneration is linked to a verifiable outcome, including CPS and CPA, within social platforms. The analysis conceptualizes marketing rent as surplus income generated through institutional and technological control over consumer attention as a scarce resource. It also treats marketing rent as a redistribution mechanism through which income moves from advertising networks and media intermediaries to content producers. A longitudinal comparative analysis of consumer patterns from 2010 to 2025 identifies a change in the dominant mode of consumption. Search organized around intention and query has been partially displaced by product discovery shaped by social interaction and recommendation loops. This shift changes the point at which purchasing interest emerges. As a result, recommendation systems and socially mediated trust signals acquire a central economic function within platform commerce. The empirical section uses the case of a store operating on TikTok Shop. This case illustrates how content formats, affiliate arrangements, and institutionalized trust markers, including a review volume above 1000 and the presence of Lab Tested status, affect conversion and reduce transactional uncertainty. The causal link is straightforward: visible signals of verification reduce perceived risk at the moment of purchase. In consequence, trust becomes an asset that can be expressed in economic terms. The findings show that an increase in customer acquisition costs in auction channels by 40 to 60 percent changes the relative efficiency of monetization models. Because commission based schemes tie payment to realized results, they reduce the share of commercial risk borne by brands before conversion occurs. This model also allows content creators to appropriate part of marketing rent through the accumulation and capitalization of trust capital. At the theoretical level, the paper proposes the concept of algorithmic attention rent. This concept explains how platform ranking systems and reach allocation algorithms convert attention into transactional probability and define the conditions under which rent is extracted within the ecosystem. From this perspective, the development of electronic commerce points toward a decentralized system of outcome based transactions in which value is allocated not by the fact of an impression, but by verifiable effect and trust mediated purchasing.

Keywords: Social Commerce, Marketing Rent, Creator Economy, Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), Affiliate Marketing, Algorithmic Rent, CPS Models, Consumer Trust.

https://doi.org/10.70315/uloap.ulbec.2025.0202019