Upgrading Dropbox to 16GB for 25USD
blog.dispatched.ch
blog.dispatched.ch
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 hope they have some really solid data showing that this is irrelevant.
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.
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.
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.
$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.
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.
This is a good way to burn those $100 AdWords credits that Google likes to hand out like candy.
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 demand for large personal data storage (for non-pirates of course) is decreasing I say.
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.
And my personal music collection is in the 100s of gigabytes (all legally purchased and ripped from CD).
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?
Awesome post! Clever idea.
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.
But I plan on remembering. Very cool idea.
Click on the bookmarklet and you can have the page you're on emailed to you in 2 months.
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
Also, here's the Dropbox page to get additional space by connecting your social networking accounts: https://www.dropbox.com/free