
Maxing out your Dropbox referrals (how I got 16GB for less than $10) - vrikhter
http://vladik.rikhter.org/2011/09/22/maxing-out-your-dropbox-referrals-how-i-got-16gb-for-less-than-10/
======
MikeGrace
This is awesome! Haha! Really impressive what can be done with a bit of
advertising and some good tools. Reminds me of 2 articles I read a while ago.

1\. Advertiser/marketer got his ads in front of the people he wanted to
interview with: <http://mashable.com/2010/05/13/job-google-ad-words/>

2\. Reporter got inside information on a murder through her blog and Google
analytics: [http://lauraamico.tumblr.com/post/11316313807/online-
investi...](http://lauraamico.tumblr.com/post/11316313807/online-
investigative-journalism-more-on-reporting)

------
Anti-Ratfish
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...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriabarret/2011/10/18/dropbox-
the-inside-story-of-techs-hottest-startup/3/)

~~~
vrikhter
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.

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matdwyer
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
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.

~~~
matdwyer
Agreed - I'm not saying they'd stop you (you're basically doing their
marketing job!), just pointing out that it could be a closed up loophole. For
example, the more people that are bidding that, the higher dropbox has to pay
for their own ad buys... i.e. if everyone is doing this, they either stop
doing the ads themselves (unlikely, as they can't monitor) or stop the
practice so they can control their trademark searches (for optimization, etc)

Anyway, not saying what you did was bad - I think it is really cool!

------
xutopia
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
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.

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dageshi
Erm, am I missing something, is there a reason why dropbox seems to be
inhabiting the top of hackernews today? Is there an IPO in the offing that
I've missed? Why the sudden PR offensive?

~~~
Talon
This Forbes article, mostly:
[http://viewtext.org/article?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.forbes.com%...](http://viewtext.org/article?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.forbes.com%2Fsites%2Fvictoriabarret%2F2011%2F10%2F18%2Fdropbox-
the-inside-story-of-techs-hottest-startup%2F&format=)

------
namank
Getting a user to buy advertising for them?

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

------
pieter
Might be easier to run it through Mechanical Turk

~~~
pepijndevos
Huh? How? I googled it, and it seems to be something about freelance work?

~~~
MichaelApproved
Think of it as micro-jobs. It's a service that allows you to post small tasks
for a small amount of money. The pay ranges from anywhere from a few pennies
to a few dollars and takes anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes to
complete.

I believe the parent was suggesting you post the job requesting people signup
for and install Dropbox. It's a flawed idea since it violates both service's
TOS.

~~~
MaxGabriel
In fact, 7 of the 9 specific examples of prohibited activity [1] would fit
this task

"HITs requiring disclosure of the Worker's identity or e-mail address, either
directly or indirectly

HITs requiring registration at another website or group

HITs that directly or indirectly promote a site, service, or opinion

HITs that violate the terms and conditions of an activity or website (for
instance asking Workers to vote for something)

HITs that generate "referred" site visits or click-through traffic

HITs that ask Workers to take action to manipulate a website's behavior or
results

HITs that require Workers to download software"

[1] <https://www.mturk.com/mturk/help?helpPage=policies>

------
BrokenDroid
post your invite-link here and I'll put it in www.dropbox.it for free.

~~~
BrokenDroid
@gallamine, @brlewis done. "it" stands for "italy"

~~~
ebw122
<http://db.tt/d168Jff> thanks!

------
jayfehr
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
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
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.

~~~
vrikhter
Thanks Jon! I imagine the prices would go up only temporarily.

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francescolaffi
Students can go to <https://www.dropbox.com/edu> and get double referrals
(500mb) and double referral limit(16GB), is also retroactive!

------
rhplus
SkyDrive coupled with webdav and your favorite sync tool will get you 25GB
free:

<http://www.google.com/search?q=skydrive+webdav+25GB>

And for completeness, here's a bunch of other file-syncing services:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_hosting_serv...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_hosting_services)

------
Tossrock
I read that you can do it yourself by instantiating a VM and installing
dropbox there, rinse+repeat till you're maxed out.

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nimblegorilla
Pretty cool.

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

~~~
Zhenya
Definitely not a viral campaign. I know this guy personally and he is a clever
little beaver.

~~~
ohashi
I am amazed people don't have friends to push it to. I upped my storage by
just suggesting it to friends and family.

~~~
bockris
I invited some colleagues but Dropbox denied the referrals because they said
it came from the same computer. It came from the same IP (our corp firewall).
I didn't feel like fighting it because I'm under my limit anyway.

------
arikrak
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.

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msinghai
I guess shelling out 5$ in mturk, could more effectively do the job, in less
time.

------
alsocasey
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
I heard from a friend Poker sites got referrals too. Wonder if you can use
this technique for those sites.

------
suivix
You sound like the phone phreakers of the 80s who thought they were the
coolest people for getting free phone calls and had to tell just everyone.

~~~
Zhenya
Sounds like you're mad because you paid for phone calls.

------
jemeshsu
Box.net running a promotion till Dec 2, download Box.Net iOS app, sign in or
register new account, and get 50GB free.

~~~
speedracr
Yes, unfortunately you don't get access to the desktop application unless you
sign up for a premium plan. Also, the file size limits for upload are lower
unless you are a premium user. So maybe don't bother, if Dropbox works for you
in the free version.

~~~
cmer
There's a way around it. It's just WebDav.

Here's how to do it on Ubuntu, it works just as well on my Mac:
[http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/ubuntu/how-to-access-your-
box...](http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/ubuntu/how-to-access-your-boxnet-
account-from-ubuntu-the-easy-way/)

~~~
insanecanadian
Yeah, this really is the best route in most cases anyway. Besides, it's one
less thing that you are stuck installing.

