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

vladik.rikhter.org

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

#22

Post by matdwyer »

vrikhter wrote: post #12
matdwyer wrote: post #3

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

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.…

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!

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

#24

Post by 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.

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

#27

Post by AdamTReineke »

pepijndevos wrote: post #21
pieter wrote: post #7

Might be easier to run it through Mechanical Turk

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

You pay people to perform small tasks: in this case, join Dropbox.

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

#29

Post by MichaelApproved »

pepijndevos wrote: post #21
pieter wrote: post #7

Might be easier to run it through Mechanical Turk

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

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.

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