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

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.<p>1. Advertiser/marketer got his ads in front of the people he wanted to interview with: <a href="http://mashable.com/2010/05/13/job-google-ad-words/" rel="nofollow">http://mashable.com/2010/05/13/job-google-ad-words/</a><p>2. Reporter got inside information on a murder through her blog and Google analytics: <a href="http://lauraamico.tumblr.com/post/11316313807/online-investigative-journalism-more-on-reporting" rel="nofollow">http://lauraamico.tumblr.com/post/11316313807/online-investi...</a>

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.". <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriabarret/2011/10/18/dropbox-the-inside-story-of-techs-hottest-startup/3/" rel="nofollow">http://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriabarret/2011/10/18/dropbo...</a>

Very smart, but is it against the TOS to bid directly on the trademark/company name? Often times it is.<p>That being said, they likely will not care with you being an extremely small player and bringing them 32 new customers.<p>Solid Hack, congrats<p>edit - CPC are going sky high after this :-) people might want to wait for a few weeks to let others forget

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.<p>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.

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?

Getting a user to buy advertising for them?<p>See now thats why Dropbox is the hottest thing right now!

Might be easier to run it through Mechanical Turk

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

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

Spend your time and money to "earn" the pleasure of being more engaged &#38; reliant on DropBox.<p>I bet a very high percentage of people with high referrals wind up spending ~$100/yr after burning through that 16gig.<p>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 :)

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

SkyDrive coupled with webdav and your favorite sync tool will get you 25GB free:<p><a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=skydrive+webdav+25GB" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/search?q=skydrive+webdav+25GB</a><p>And for completeness, here's a bunch of other file-syncing services: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_hosting_services" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_hosting_serv...</a>

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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