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The Great Dropbox Space Race
- fudged71 14y agoGreat idea for a viral campaign
- ewolf 14y agoI love how number 1, 2, and 4 are Singaporean :D Nerd country!
- spartango 14y agoWell that, and the time difference. Students in Singapore woke up 15 hours before their counterparts on the West Coast of the US. It's neat to see the effects of a global operation.
- onedev 14y agoDropbox are genius at marketing their product. Absolutely genius.
- joshj19 14y agoUmm not to sound too negative, but genius is a pretty strong word. What about this is genius? Referral programs are hardly anything new.
- coolnow 14y agoI think the genius he's referring to is the fact that they're trying to get educational institutions and students hooked on Dropbox, who could then go on to deploying Dropbox for the whole university (unlikely, but it could happen one day) and the students can go on to relying on Dropbox for their future projects, potentially upgrading to Pro at some point.
- onedev 14y agoExactly this. Just looking at my posts in my Facebook newsfeed and Facebook groups, this thing went insanely viral in a matter of minutes and people really are signing up for Dropbox and really noticing it (those who haven't been using it before). The fact that they have a competition among universities and have the "top students" at each university is a massive plus in getting people excited about Dropbox.
- rsync 14y agoThey need to pump the growth numbers a bit more before the IPO. Not the profit numbers, mind you, but the user numbers.
- mirkules 14y agoYep. Microsoft gave away free software for years (Windows, Visual Studio and Office suites) to students in order to get them excited about their technologies and familiarized with their development environment. One day, those students will graduate and be ready to join the .net (or what-have-you) workforce(). There are entire universities that only offer courses with Microsoft technologies (mine was one such school at one point), so it's not unreasonable or unlikely that Dropbox can infiltrate the education market. () In some cases, though, Microsoft conditioned students to think that all software should be free... oh, the irony!
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- mdonahoe 14y ago1. It has a good name and theme. "Space Race" is a genius choice due to its double meaning. 2. This is marketed more as a competition between organizations than a simple referral program. Neither is a new idea, but the combination is interesting. Also, the references to the Cold War are interesting, though I may be looking into it too much. Personal rewards for referring friends is like capitalism. Group rewards for each school is like communism. With Dropbox, you get both! :)
- stephengillie 14y agoMost of my friends don't understand what Dropbox is nor why they'd need it. They would rather transfer files by USB drive and email. And these are people that live off Netflix and Pandora and Facebook, so it's not like they're Luddites...
- coolnow 14y agoMy friends were like that too. Netflix, Grooveshark, Spotify etc but still relied on remembering to bring a USB stick around. Once i showed them the usefulness of Dropbox (and the fact that you can store ebooks on your account and then transfer them to iBooks), they began to adopt it. A few months down the line, i have more friends with Dropbox than without, and we've also set up shared folders with our ebook collections and regularly talk about what we read this week. I could never imagine hooking my friends on to books, but i guess they all had the hunger for it, but not the means.
- mayneack 14y agoThat's not universally true. I got my parents to use it and through that, my entire extended family uses it as our primary mode of photo-sharing. There are a few people in that group over 70 with paying subscriptions that know how to use dropbox more than almost anything else more complex than a word processor.
- seanlinehan 14y agoI wrote a blog post about this exactly! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4656911 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4656911
- mintplant 14y agoI don't really understand what's going on here. Could someone please explain this to me?
- nostromo 14y agoBetter description here: https://blog.dropbox.com/index.php/now-announcing-the-great-dropbox-space-race/ https://blog.dropbox.com/index.php/now-announcing-the-great-...
- bankim 14y agoThat's a great idea to get users!
- Simucal 14y agoI see that the rewards for this program are for a limited time (extra 3GB for 2 years). Maybe they realized their free plan + referral space was too generous. I currently have 21.9GB for free on my Dropbox taking advantage of the 18GB of referrals you can get as well as the additional couple GB they give you if you use the "Camera Upload" feature. If they gave all these students that 3GB permanently that might bring people up to some sweet spot where most of them wouldn't have a real need to pay for the service.
- randomchars 14y agoI'm not sure. They had time limited offers before this with both HTC and Samsung. If they didn't have a referral program I wouldn't use them.
- quarterto 14y agoWith referrals, camera upload, and HTC's 25GB for two years free deal, I'm up to 34GB.
- zanny 14y agoI have DSL internet with a peak of around 60 KB/s up (thanks to the US telecom monopoly, my only other option is cable for around $80 a month with 300KB up). I couldn't saturate my drive, dropbox, and Ubuntu one accounts even if I wanted to.
- Simucal 14y agoI'm just curious, but do you live in a rural area?
- Cass 14y agoI wonder what they're going to do when the promotion time runs out. If they're going to delete or block access to a random 3 GB of data in someone's dropbox, they're going to be dealing with a lot of upset customers. (Should these people be aware of the fact that their space is going to run out, and have up-to-date backups of their stuff? Obviously. But the hard fact of life is that people do use dropbox as their only backup, and if something goes wrong there, they're going to be a customer support headache.)
- metra 14y agoHow will they reclaim the space in two years time for users who, for whatever reason, don't explicitly choose the files they want to keep?
- sim0n 14y agoThey likely won't remove the files, just stop you from syncing until you remove enough files.
- randomchars 14y agoIIRC if you go over your limit you will not be able to add any more files. They won't delete them.
- camiller 14y agoI believe the way it works is you simply can't add any new (or update existing) files until you delete enough stuff to make the space available. They won't actually delete your existing stuff. (well i suppose if your account is inactive long enough and they have sent you enough warning email they might, way down the road, simply delete your account. But lets face it, storage is pretty cheap per GB now days. I doubt they will find it necessary to do that.
- stephengillie 14y agoWhen you're over limit, sync stops until you remove some items. How much cheaper will that space be in 2 years, due to the advancement of storage technologies and proliferation of storage devices?
- venus 14y agoI don't really understand Dropbox's pricing strategy. Free is 2GB, which is no-where near enough. But if you want to pay for more, you have to go all the way to 100GB, which is way too much, for me at least. And the only in-between option is to engage in these kind of games or spamming your friends to try to make them sign up. I'm not going to do that. Dropbox, if you would just offer $20/20GB and $50/50GB accounts I know at least 5 people who would upgrade immediately. I feel like people want to pay, but such a massive and unnecessary jump in capacity from the free to the lowest paid plan is a real problem. And yeah, I do feel a bit personally annoyed about this - I (somewhat reluctantly) pay for a 100GB account; I use perhaps 10% of it. I really don't care about this viral marketing to school students. Dropbox, concentrate on your actual paying customers please. EDIT: I checked and I use 7.0% of my 104.2GB paid account allowance.
- aristidb 14y agoThere is a case to be made that charging less than $10/month for a service is not good business. People like patio11 make it constantly. The reason is that people who pay low amounts are the most demanding in terms of support, and don't actually contribute much to the bottom line. Ignore for a moment that 100 GB is more than you need. Is $10/month too much for you? Well... But you don't need to spam friends, there are regularly things like contests (Dropquest 2011, 2012) where you get free space for completing tasks. And then there's of course the competition.
- venus 14y ago> There is a case to be made that charging less than $10/month for a service is not good business. I don't think so. Just last week I signed up for unblockus.com; $5/month. Every domain name registrar on the planet - $12 a year or so. Full automated services should not be subject to a monthly minimum, and they shouldn't need support. > people who pay low amounts are the most demanding in terms of support Do you really think this would be a big factor for Dropbox? If so - just say any under-100GB account has the same support as the free account. > Is $10/month too much for you? Well no it's not, obviously, since that's what I pay. But I am the only person I know with a pro account, since it's such overkill, and even I kind of resent paying for so much more than I need. I like Dropbox, I want to use it. Just let me pay an appropriate amount for an appropriate usage! > you don't need to spam friends, there are regularly things like contests (Dropquest 2011, 2012) where you get free space for completing tasks I am guessing you are pretty young. You will be amazed at how quickly your tolerance for such things decreases with age. Free space for completing tasks? That does not even make sense, because if you have to complete some task it is obviously not free. How about I just do my job, and buy things I need (like dropbox), and everyone is happy.
- randomchars 14y agoIf only I had a university email account. I would just launch an adwords campaign. :)
- Goopplesoft 14y agoThey block dropbox links nowadays.
- meritt 14y agoAny word on if Dropbox will ever add the ability to sync arbitrary directories and not only the 'Dropbox' one? That's the reason I won't use their service. I want to see native support that doesn't require workarounds such as symlinks -- their competitors all offer this feature.
- samspot 14y agoDo you have a philosophical objection to using symlinks? As of the last time I checked, you also need a symlink for Google drive.
- mayneack 14y agoThat's what I use on ubuntu 12.04 and it is great. Only problem is that if your directories overlap inside dropbox, they count twice. I'm rarely above 50gb though, so doubling a random directory (like linking my camera uploads to photos) is never a problem.
- meritt 14y agoI personally don't have a problem using symlinks but it's a user-experience thing. I know plenty of less-savvy friends and family who have a need to backup and/or share things -- Let's say a 'Photos' directory or maybe a 'Taxes' directory. Telling those people they must relocate their directories inside 'Dropbox' is confusing and, depending on the source files, can often break things (in the event of application files that has a particular requirement for the directory structure) Trying to tell those same users how to create a symlink is unrealistic and should not be necessary for a user-friendly backup & sharing platform. I didn't want to name drop other competitors because that wasn't the intent of my post, but as you brought it up, I'm talking about more user-friendly competition such as Mozy, Carbonite or SugarSync.
- samspot 14y agoThanks for clarifying. I agree with you on the usability issues, but would have expected you to say "won't recommend" instead of "won't use". I have noticed a surprising number of non-technical (70-year old couple at church) people using dropbox, but that could be due to access to technical friends and family (their 25 year old programmer son).
- ezpassmac 14y agoWhat other promotions has Dropbox done in the past?
- k_kelly 14y agoI'm really interested that MIT is now top of the board considering it's a relatively small university. It makes me wonder if this is going to become a situation like when Slashdot attempted to poll for best graduate cs department and it was botted to hell and back.
- carb 14y agoI've been sent the referral link about fifteen different times in the past hour from distinct people. It's been sent out on most mailing lists, shared like crazy on facebook and in facebook groups, etc.
- mdonahoe 14y agoI have a theory: Are you less annoyed by the spam because it will benefit everyone at MIT? I think students will be more willing to spam because it isnt seen as being selfish.
- mayneack 14y agoDropbox t-shirts are prime MIT fashion and the dropbox events at the career fair last week were way over capacity. People here are really enthusiastic.
- underwater 14y agoDropbox reminds me a lot of webmail before Gmail. There were lots of small increments in available space but it was always an issue for users. When Gmail launched wih the promise that users would never again have to manage remaining space they obliterated the competition. Dropbox is training users to attach a high value to small amounts of space. When a competent competitor launches with an order of magnitude more space it will immediately seem like a much better deal because of Dropbox's years of conditioning their users to think the only value proposition is the physical space.
- msrpotus 14y agoThe question is: how do you monetize near-limitless storage? Google figured that out with ads. Until someone finds a way to pay for it, that won't happen and once someone figures it out, Dropbox will probably be able to do the same.
- gabemart 14y agoWhile I agree with your point generally, I think it's unfair to say that Dropbox is conditioning users to think the only value proposition is disk space. For me, the Dropbox client, web integration and storage features are streets ahead of the competition (at least, last time I checked). The free on-by-default document versioning is invaluable to me. It's just difficult to "condition your users" to value software features because by the time you're in a position to condition them to value anything, they already have access to 100% of your software features.
- edanm 14y ago
- eric-hu 14y agoAs of the time of this writing, there are 4 Portugese universities among the top 10. I would've expected tech-heavy universities to place among the top 10. Is this the case with these schools? 2 Universidade Técnica de Lisboa 3694 8298 points 6 Universidade de Aveiro 2244 4812 points 8 Universidade do Porto 2060 4538 points 9 Universidade Nova de Lisboa 1943 4079 points
- alexdias 14y agoYes. #2 is especially known for its technical institute (IST, where I study), which competes with another one in #8 for the title of the country's best engineering school (the one in Porto has been winning past years' programming competitions). #6 is known in the country for its CS degree.
- tiagomatos 14y agoThey are all portuguese tech universities. I have studied at #8.
- jefflamth 14y agoAnd... NUS wins!
- dehuayang 14y agoIt seems that we can't use this in China.