The more users register the more storage space they get. Schools get one point for every student that joins, and two for those that complete the Get Started guide. Every new added student will get 3 GB of space, and next 3GB they will receive after the school passes the next three pre-set thresholds. These thresholds are set by Dropbox separately for every institution. Currently the top rank on the leaderboard belongs to MIT students that have registered 4338 users so far; they are followed by Portugese Universidade Técnica de Lisboa with 3205 users and Delft University of Technology with 2769.

It Looks like Dropbox found a nice way to promote its services and from personal experience they landed on a great surface, as it's quite popular among students. Google and Microsoft have started to provide more services for schools with huge cloud storage options and now it’s the turn of independent cloud storage vendors to respond to that if they want to stay competitive. Obviously this will bring Dropbox quite a lot of new users as schools will also compete to get on the leaderboard by bringing as many new students to the service as they can.

[Ed – This move is an old one that IBM, Microsoft, Apple and even Xerox used to pull. If you get the kids (or students) using your product early then you often will keep them with you for a long time. This is even more true of cloud storage due to the annoyance of trying to download a large amount of data from any cloud service. Once you break over that 2GB mark simple file transfer and even FTP start to take a very long time to complete. It is often simpler to just pay the increased bill (after the free time is up) and not worry about it. This is certainly what Dropbox is hoping for with their new promotion…]

What do you think about Dropbox’s move?