Bitcoin Forum

Good evening, what is everyone's opinion on coin "airdrops"? Do you feel this is a cheap trick to create demand in their business model, or is there a better reason for doing so?

In my mind- I always think they uses airdrops to pull crowds attention, another free money/token introduced by ICOs as marketing strategy. I stand to be corrected

ICO and airdrop are two words that can never go together. The whole point of ICO is to raise funds for developmental purposes by offering the project's tokens in return, while the idea behind airdrops is just to distribute tokens to the public. Of course the circulating supply in airdrops gets diluted quickly with more number of rounds and as a result the token value drops as well. With ICOs, the price of the token depends on the progress and implementation of the project.

I get the frustration for investors with airdrops but quite frankly this the cryptocurrency,  the pinnacle of decentralization, this is what draws in so many different kinds of people from different backgrounds and ages.  I guess investors should keep this in mind while investing in ico/ito or feeling bad about airdrops, otherwise theres always the share market they can deal with - no airdrops, no decentralization.

You said it all :) ICOs and airdrops are totally different tactics.
Most tokens that used Airdrops failed dramatically. by making an arirdrop, devs intention is to attract as many customers as possible,
The problem is that people participating in airdrops just want free coins and have no intention to invest thus the first thing they will do when they receive
free coins is to sell them with any price.

Generally investors don't trust tokens being distributed for free.

If you have a legit product and looking to raise funds through an ICO, Airdrop is a sure shot way to kill investor confidence and your project.

PROXY token was a big example of this. The devs were good but they started an airdrop at the same time as the ICO opened. Almost 2000 people poured into their telegram in a few hours. The telegram chat got flooded with people posting their addresses and despite being a good project with a working product, they ended with 3 ETH raised.
This was pretty unfortunate and the devs have been sulking a lot since them. Can't blame them of course except that they should have thought it out better.

ICOS and AIRDROPS are different..

I don't think its a cheap trick. I feel is a way to promote an ICO through social media. Though most of the Airdrops are pure scams.

Now a days most of the Airdrops want you to share the link and do some or the other marketing stuff before offering free coins.

Yes, it is a trick to make their coin scar and once the coin is scars in the market, people demanding for the coin will increase. They used the airdrop trick instead of coin burning but some crypto scammer are using the airdrop to scam people this days. Beware!

It's not a "cheap trick", but it is a way to gain attention of people. New cryptocurrencies need their demanding, it's just a part of developing a project and moving forward.
Anyway, you don't even have to spend something on it except for your time, but if it's going to be worthy, then why not  :)

If you are looking for a promising ICO , then they will never have an airdrop . Airdrop is just for the purpose of distributing and dumping the token with a minimal or absolutely no value . That is just to get rid of the tokens somehow . However , some ICOs also use this "foolish" trick for publicity of their token and getting some investments . But that trick does not works all the time .
Airdrops are basically waste of time as the tokens always stays in the wallet and never gets a value and that is bloody irritating .                           

If you newbie in crypto and don't have any knowledge or skills for work, then airdrops should be worth for you.

The same as i thought why they have to do it to make a lot of traffic on their website or to have a lot of replies on their thread so that it will be a hot topic. They tend to pull a lot of investors on their new ICO project by attracting a lot of users to support on it and it is one of the most common marketing strategy.

I don't think it's a cheap trick at all, it is marketing. What I can tell you from personal experience though. I feel airdrops are a complete waste. You give away coins to people that can't wait to dump them. 90% of those people are ready to dump them on the first exchange that sells them. Is it actually worth it for the project? In most cases probably not. Sure it is big marketing and nothing better to catch people's attention than "FREE". I think it's a complete waste tbh. It also can lower the value of the coin and its integrity in the community I feel like.

As for random airdrops to MEW or something like that, yeah I feel it's like modern day crypto SPAM.

In my eyes its a marketing trick.. pull and attract.. but im not sure, just my logic thinking that says so :D

Ofcourse, it's the easiest way to pull traction and create a buzz rather than paying tons for promotion. For starters, this is always a good way to get attention and let the people know about the project or at least get the name heard. But again many projects come and go, only few serious one's stay for long.

I think for the most part Airdrops are simply used to garner attention in the ICO.

Though airdrops often try to be "fair" in the way they are distributed, they are normally not. For instance the clam air drop gave a number of clams based on the number of wallets you had prior to a certain date, rather than being based on the absolute value of bitcoin that had passed through your wallet. Though this is fair in the number of people they are distributed to, it is not fair in the amounts distributed to each person.

If the airdrops favour low volume, old BTC users, then I'm in favour, otherwise they're just a marketing gimmick. Logically, the best way to get pump an airdrop coin is to favour the whales, if they don't do this, they might just be worth trusting for the long term.

Are we looking at splits like BCH too? Doesn't that technically fall under the airdrops umbrella, since a massive number of people were credited with them? Because, I don't really mind, all those are doing are moving altcoin money into new altcoins that you and I suddenly already have some of, which we can sell for bitcoin dividends to be reinvested!

Airdrops is a good way to introduce the coin to people. But i think ICO's should not give much or allocate much coins on airdrops because it will be unfair for those who invested. When the coin enters the market, those people who got theirs from airdrops will start to sell at low, sometimes even lower than the initial ICO price. This results to lost on the side of investors.

ICO's have budget for marketing and airdrop budget can get into t hat amount ! why they are doing airdrops ? simple! by doing that they can easily get members to join on their telegram channel the more memberthey get the more investors they attract! second! those airdrop can be required something before qualifying you must follow on twitter and FB thats simply one of the best move if you are managing a facebook page !

Personally I don't see it too much as an issue, when it comes to ICO's they usually corner off a percentage for bonuses / bounty campaigns, maybe if they are not getting anywhere close to filling that quota a different strategy can be used i.e. airdrops.

It is a nice way to catch people's attention and opens up the ICO to potential adopters who maybe haven't heard about the ICO. I do believe that an ICO shouldn't just be doing airdrops consistently, but I think mixing up a marketing campaign to reach a larger audience could be beneficial.

Yes, take a look over the Announcement board of this forum, and go to the Token's ANN. It is plenty of airdrops that are using ico's structures too.

But take a look over BtcRed, litecoinRed, they all are the same garbage that are trying to create demand only by using the real name of the coin followed by a prefix.

Bitcoin gold, bitcoin gold, super bitcoin, they all are airdrops.

But i haven't seen too many airdrops using ico's, and most of them are just giving out 1 or 2 free tokens and each one of them is worth 0.00000001 eth, just dust.

Pure marketing, I don't see any criminal there. Sometimes I take part in airdrops and perceive it as little bonus.