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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think your first point is brilliant, but your second I disagree with.
$5/month is $60 a year, practically an impulse purchase for a lot of people. $10/month is $120/year. That psychologically adds an extra digit to both the monthly and years and that is also high enough to be outside impulse buy range.
Anecdotally, I love dropbox, but I don't even fully use the 2GB free account (mostly text files). I would pay $60/year immediately for even a 5GB or 10GB plan on the possibility I might need it swiftly or to give me the freedom of tossing on some more pictures of the kids. But I can't justify $120/year when I still have space left ont he free account.
I don't doubt that you and people like you are out there.
I just wonder how many of you there are.
Again, even a 10GB plan might cleave off too many 50GB users for the numbers to work out.
And for 5GB, surely more people would spam their friends for referrals or make fake email accounts, than break out their credit cards to set up recurring billing.
I'd love to set it up here for about 50 users, but we've got a bit more than the 2GB you get for free... so that means I'm shelling out something like $6,000/year. That's a tough sell for a problem that can be solved with existing infrastructure not nearly as well but for a tiny fraction the cost.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"cloud"? Isn't that what Dropbox is? And flickr/facebook are fine, until Facebook decides your name isn't your name, or Flickr decides to change its terms of service.
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
With everyone trying to do this, the CPC of every related keyword went up. Nice for people running sites that talk a lot about cloud storage and monetize with AdSense, but not so good for people trying to get free space.
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?
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.
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.
That answers the uncertainty in the blogger's disclaimer: "* Disclaimer: I can’t be sure this isn’t against the MTurk posting terms. In fact, it might be."
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.