

Upgrading Dropbox to 16GB for 25USD - preek
http://blog.dispatched.ch/2011/11/18/upgrading-dropbox-to-16gb-for-25usd/

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gravitronic
I did this last week. It was my first time using google adwords, and I learnt
a couple things.

Your ads: A ton of people will sign up for dropbox but not install the app,
gaining you no benefit. This is probably people looking for cloud storage
without the computer rights to install apps I'm guessing. My suggestion is to
write in the ad copy itself that you have to download an app. When I did this
I got less clicks and a higher conversion rate.

Your bids: keep your bid low. My first day, I kept bumping my bid and my daily
budget, and ended up spending $50 of my credit and only getting a few
completed referrals. I was spending about $.80 CPC. I reduced my budget to
$20/day maxand reset the CPC bid to "auto" and adwords began bidding around
$.08 max per click. It took longer, but I only spent about $10/day and got a
similar number of hits. Even though when I browsed the adword campaign page it
generally said it was not displaying any of my ads because my bid was low, I
still accumulated ~80k views/day for around $10.

Your keywords: I got decent results using things like "send large file free",
"share large file free", etc. When I used keywords like "dropbox" I was
usually outbid by someone else who had a higher CPC set up.

In the end I now have a 10GB dropbox account. Aside from my wasting $50 the
first day it cost me about $10/day for 3 days to accumulate enough referrals.

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shizcakes
I don't know why Dropbox STILL refuses to institute a 25GB plan. It's the most
common complaint I hear. Now, people are giving their money to Google instead
of Dropbox - that just totally seems backwards.

I hope they have some really solid data showing that this is irrelevant.

~~~
roc
I'd guess it's because the pricing doesn't work out in the aggregate. If more
people would downgrade to 25GB from 50GB than would be motivated to pull out
their credit-card by the inclusion of a 25GB plan, the thing would be a net
loss for Dropbox.

And, honestly, I can't imagine there are many people willing to pay $5/mo but
unwilling to go to $10/mo. $5/mo is such a minor difference compared to the
costs implicit in even _having_ a multiple-machine sync-ing problem to solve.

~~~
roc
Thinking about it more, I wonder if Dropbox's mistake here wasn't in having
too-high an initial price, but in being too-generous with the storage attached
to that price.

50GB is more than most people need to sync. It feels almost _wasteful_ to have
_that much_ unused storage on a 50GB plan. Perhaps 25GB should have been $10,
50GB $15 and 100GB $20.

Paying for 25GB when you only need 15GB might not feel as wasteful as paying
for 50GB when you only need 15GB. Even if the net cost is the same.

~~~
TillE
That's basically what I was going to say. If you're paying $10/month for 50GB
and only using a fraction of it, it feels like you're wasting money. Even if
that's objectively "good value", it doesn't really matter.

It's the same basic problem subscription MMOs are facing, and why so many are
going free-to-play. It's also easier to convince people to pay a bunch of
small one-time fees rather than a recurring monthly or yearly fee.

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ben1040
Another vote to say this works - I maxed out my Dropbox referrals for about 20
bucks a few weeks ago.

This is a good way to burn those $100 AdWords credits that Google likes to
hand out like candy.

~~~
ckenst
Sounds like a good hack. How much did you spend and how much additional
storage did you get?

~~~
teach
He wrote "for about 20 bucks", so I suspect he spent around $20. And "maxed
out my Dropbox referrals" seems to imply that he did it up to the maximum for
Dropbox referrals, which is 8 GB.

~~~
ben1040
You've got the first part right, but I also happen to work for a university so
I associated my .edu email address to my Dropbox account. Doing that will
double your referral bonus to 500MB per referral, and double your maximum free
space from referrals to 16GB.

~~~
docgnome
Did that happen right away that you got more space from your .edu? i put mine
it and it didn't seem to do anything.

~~~
preek
For me it did happen instantly.

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docgnome
Huh. Did the text that says what you get change? Like from 250 to 500? Maybe I
just don't know how much space I had heh.

~~~
preek
The text changed from 250 to 500, also my available space doubled. I didn't
even get an email to tell me, it just happened.

~~~
docgnome
Oh. i was just doing it wrong. doh!

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reaganing
This is clever.

I'm not sure why Dropbox doesn't offer plans with less space, and make it more
affordable. For the $100/yr a 50GB account costs, you can get 100GB (plus
unlimited storage of AAC/MP3 music) from Amazon via Cloud Drive. Granted,
you're not getting Dropbox's excellent syncing, just storage (and streaming of
music)

I'd be happy to give $20-25/yr to Dropbox for 20GB-25GB of space and syncing.

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brador
The article brings up an interesting point on the side. What do users need all
that space for these days? Movies? - itunes/netflix/amazon, music? - itunes,
games - steam, pics - cloud/flickr/facebook.

The demand for large personal data storage (for non-pirates of course) is
decreasing I say.

~~~
krschultz
In my case it's pictures. Yes, some of my pictures are on Facebook and Flickr.
All of them are backed up in the cloud. And I still have 3-4 different
computers synced with all of them.

You can download/stream music or movies, but I can never go back in time and
take family pictures again. I might be overly sensitive to it because my
grandparents lost all of their pictures in a storage unit fire, but I think it
is a fair point.

My pictures fill up approximately 40-60 GB. I have about 200 GB of other
files, of which maybe 1GB is critical. If I lost the rest I wouldn't really
care, so I only backup the pictures in the cloud.

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wybo
Did this as well about a year ago (after referring many of my classmates), and
it works. Getting the remaining referrals through AdWords took a bit more
money than $25 though (about $30 for 10 referrals). Maybe could have improved
the wording of the ad...

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SODaniel
With SpiderOak, all you have to do is refer 14 friends. Just throwing it out
there as an alternative: <https://spideroak.com>

~~~
kijin
I've been using SpiderOak since Dropbox's misleading-advertising-about-
encryption fiasco. SpiderOak is rock stable, supports full client-side
encryption, offers cheaper plans, and I also got the 50% educational discount.
But the sync functionality is slow as molasses.

When I log into either my desktop or my laptop, it takes several minutes
before SpiderOak will actually sync any files. This gets frustrating after a
while, so I sometimes just whip out a USB stick to copy the files I'd been
working on.

A few weeks ago I added my VPS to my SpiderOak account. It took almost an hour
for initial sync to complete, despite the fact that there was nothing to sync.

Dropbox, on the other hand, only takes as much time as it takes to transfer
the actual file(s) back and forth. It doesn't even seem to scan the Dropbox
folder for changes, or if it does, it's very quick. I can't imagine how
they're doing this, but if Dropbox can do this, why can't SpiderOak?

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rishi
This is proof that Dropbox's referral strategy is working. This guy spent $25
to acquire a bunch of new users for DropBox. Way cheaper than what DropBox
probably pays for the same users.

Awesome post! Clever idea.

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msutherl
I set this up 3 hours ago and I've had 2 "Joins" and one "Completed". The 2
joins were from France.

So far I have CPC on auto and capped at $0.15. Budget is at $10 per day
Limited to US, UK, CA, FR English and French A mix of specific keywords
(dropbox, drop box, dropbox registration) and non-specific (send large file,
share files, etc.)

Adwords isn't showing any data yet. Also signed up for academic Dropbox, which
I did not know about. That converted my old referrals (from back when it was
new) so now I'm at 4.8GB.

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ch0wn
I did the same thing, costed me about 15 Euros to max out my referral bonus.
For the first 15 signups, the conversion rate was above 40%.

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Osiris
Non-education users can only get up to 10GB free with referrals. I
accomplished that by putting a link on my website's download page.

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DanielBMarkham
This is an awesome idea which now, due to the HN effect, will take another 60
days before it will work again, if ever.

But I plan on remembering. Very cool idea.

~~~
dwwoelfel
I made a app/bookmarklet that works pretty well in these situations:
<http://app.reminderbear.com/>

Click on the bookmarklet and you can have the page you're on emailed to you in
2 months.

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iamichi
I did this last year and hit the maximum number of referrals in 5 days for
about $10. I used an Ad-words voucher as well.

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dmak
Correct me if I am wrong, but I believed you were only allowed to do direct
linking if that domain belonged to you. Seeing how that Dropbox referral is
NOT then you could potentially get banned. Google has done ban waves before,
and they will do it again.

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sosuke
I have an AdWords campaign with this setup, I added all the keywords, settings
etc and it never gets any clicks. I upped the CPC limit and still nothing. I
want it to work but it just hasn't yet.

~~~
preek
Is Google giving you impressions for the ad?

~~~
sosuke
Not even impressions.

~~~
preek
Care to share how you did the setup? I guess there's something flawed. Sounds
more like it's something fundamental. Is your credit card expired? Do other
AdWords campaigns work?

~~~
sosuke
I have another campaign I paused when I created this one that was working. All
lights are green on the interface. I've got it paused for now I figured I
would try it again after the first article I had followed died down.

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madd_o
It worked!

In two hours, for 6 dollars, I got all the confirmed referrals.

Fun way to learn how to use Adwords.

Dug out an old .edu email account I had also, up to 18 gigs for "free" XD

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jbverschoor
Yah thanks.. got my adwords account suspended

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mkr-hn
Contact them and get it unsuspended.

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southpolesteve
Good luck with that. AdWords is notorious for being difficult in this regard.

~~~
mkr-hn
I got my account unsuspended with a simple request.

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dstein64
Another option is to use Amazon Mechanical Turk:
[http://codyaray.com/2010/10/dropbox-referrals-using-
mechanic...](http://codyaray.com/2010/10/dropbox-referrals-using-mechanical-
turk)

Also, here's the Dropbox page to get additional space by connecting your
social networking accounts: <https://www.dropbox.com/free>

~~~
gravitronic
Using mechanical turk would be against both Amazon's ToS and Dropbox's (having
the turk's sign up to a service or provide personal details / email)

~~~
dvcat
I don't understand why using mturk is against Dropbox's TOS. Surely from
Dropbox's pov, the privacy (or loss of privacy) is identical in both the case
of mturk and adwords.

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scrrr
also see: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3126173>

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kevinherron
Clever girl.

