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Maxing out your Dropbox referrals (how I got 16GB for less than $10)

104 points| vrikhter | 14 years ago |vladik.rikhter.org | reply

132 comments

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[+] Anti-Ratfish|14 years ago|reply
That's clever. The Forbes story mentions the use of google advertising done directly by dropbox, but noted they found it ineffective. However that probably referred to the uptake of paid subscriptions? "They toyed with advertising. “That’s what you’re supposed to do: hire a marketing guy, buy Google AdWords,” says Houston. “We sucked at it.” It was costing them $300 to hook one sign-up.". http://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriabarret/2011/10/18/dropbo...
[+] vrikhter|14 years ago|reply
If you notice, a lot of my clicks were through the keyword 'dropbox'...it may not be helpful for them to be bidding on their own company name.

I also think that this was a couple years ago before the intent to search for a product like this may have been lower. It's possible they would get completely different results today.

[+] sammcd|14 years ago|reply
I bet the key difference here is that now people are much more likely to use google specifically to find dropbox.
[+] matdwyer|14 years ago|reply
Very smart, but is it against the TOS to bid directly on the trademark/company name? Often times it is.

That being said, they likely will not care with you being an extremely small player and bringing them 32 new customers.

Solid Hack, congrats

edit - CPC are going sky high after this :-) people might want to wait for a few weeks to let others forget

[+] vrikhter|14 years ago|reply
I'm not sure. I didn't bother looking at this. I spoke to someone at Dropbox about this and he's seen the numbers, he seemed to be more interested in what I did rather than reprimanding me for doing it.

Thing is that everyone maxes out at some point. You can only have so many referrals. Once you give them 32 new customers, you stop running the ads and move on with life.

Also, you're just re-routing the new customers. They would have signed up potentially on their own (as you can see the multitude of clicks from the keyword 'dropbox'), so I imagine that could be the only problem for them - acquiring customers by having to give you extra space that would have signed up without having to give anyone extra space.

[+] calbear81|14 years ago|reply
There are protected trademarks that are registered with Google that are protected in their system but even then, I believe the rule is you cannot use the trademark in your ad copy but you can still target the term in you list. In many mature industries, the major players have reciprocal agreements in place with their suppliers and even with competitors to not bid on branded/trademarked terms.
[+] scrrr|14 years ago|reply
When CPC are going high I suggest to target other countries and languages
[+] xutopia|14 years ago|reply
I did something really similar than this and only told my close friends about it because I didn't want everyone doing it and running the fun for us.

For the record my adword fu isn't as good as this person and I spent a little over 20$ to max out my free space.

[+] vrikhter|14 years ago|reply
When did you run the ads? They may have just gotten more expensive over time. I ran these a while ago, but only blogged about it recently.
[+] namank|14 years ago|reply
Getting a user to buy advertising for them?

See now thats why Dropbox is the hottest thing right now!

[+] pieter|14 years ago|reply
Might be easier to run it through Mechanical Turk
[+] pepijndevos|14 years ago|reply
Huh? How? I googled it, and it seems to be something about freelance work?
[+] BrokenDroid|14 years ago|reply
post your invite-link here and I'll put it in www.dropbox.it for free.
[+] jayfehr|14 years ago|reply
Reddit used to be big on karma parties, so when Dropbox first increased the limit from 5GB to 10GB I figured I would try a Dropbox party. I posted my referral link and encouraged others to do the same. A couple hours later I had maxed out my referrals. Since then I've seen others try, and at first they were well received but now they get downvoted pretty quickly.

Anyway, I guess my point is to try and see if other sites you visit will allow threads to share Dropbox invites. It is spam but since the referrals benefit both the invitee and inviter evenly some forums may allow it.

edit: I see there are some comments in thread already doing just that.

[+] aresant|14 years ago|reply
Spend your time and money to "earn" the pleasure of being more engaged & reliant on DropBox.

I bet a very high percentage of people with high referrals wind up spending ~$100/yr after burning through that 16gig.

Not trying to be a cynic - fun hack, but don't under value your time unless you want to use this as a learning experience :)

[+] jonmc12|14 years ago|reply
Well, you are basically saying don't waste time referring people to Dropbox given their incentives. I did this trick a few weeks ago when Vladik initially posted. Cost me $13 in total (+ about 10min of my time) to go from 2.8GB to 10.8GB. Followed instructions to a 't'. Although the 2nd day I bumped my min up to $0.10 - got click-throughs a lot faster, but I would recommend staying at the $.05 max.

Pure ROI, say I could have billed $30 for my 10min + $13 on adwords - then amortize over 4 years (assuming thats how long I would have my free 8GB with dropbox). I get my 8GB for $.90/month. Its no steal, but that is a solid deal.

Of course, now that this technique hit HN, I would expect the adword prices to go up. Great hack Vladik! Thanks again for sharing.

[+] Tossrock|14 years ago|reply
I read that you can do it yourself by instantiating a VM and installing dropbox there, rinse+repeat till you're maxed out.
[+] nimblegorilla|14 years ago|reply
Pretty cool.

The cynic in me wonders if this could be a clever viral campaign by dropbox to get cheap online ads.

[+] Zhenya|14 years ago|reply
Definitely not a viral campaign. I know this guy personally and he is a clever little beaver.
[+] arikrak|14 years ago|reply
If you haven't used Adwords yet, Google has many free $75 and $100 coupons floating around online, so it shouldn't cost anything. I wonder if its fair to Dropbox though if you target people who would have signed up anyways. Also, if you need so much space, there are cheaper alternatives.
[+] msinghai|14 years ago|reply
I guess shelling out 5$ in mturk, could more effectively do the job, in less time.
[+] alsocasey|14 years ago|reply
You used to be able to create new accounts using your own referral link and virtualized systems (via VirtualBox) + a trash email account. That's how I maxed my free account at any rate.
[+] Pickels|14 years ago|reply
I heard from a friend Poker sites got referrals too. Wonder if you can use this technique for those sites.