New Culture of Airdrops to create ICO Hype

I have started seeing a trend recently... to build social media presence especially Telegram followers, free bounties like airdrop have suddenly become commonplace for the new ICO projects who by any other means would find it difficult to even add a thousand followers.... initially, it was very exciting for people and we saw some good projects like Current or Havven (at least the two I followed) doing it, but suddenly and swiftly 'all and sundry' jumped in the fray offering free tokens, asking people to bring in their references. Today we have tens of airdrop telegram group luring people to join them for keeping them informed of new airdrops. I guess such groups may have vested interests or purely marketing platforms for new ICOs.

Many of these new ICO projects are useless which would not have seen the light of the day otherwise in a normal course. However, by focusing on pure marketing things like preparing a good website or white paper with a bit deep technical language and by giving free bounties, they are building communities. Whitepapers are making tall promises on the solution of a problem or issue and with unrealistic timelines. I have doubts if any of such projects are going to succeed.

Another big problem is that in the process of getting you signed up for bounties, they end up getting all the information about us (a lot of time private info), and access rights to read your messages, contacts, tweets etc. They force us to follow them on all the channels.

Suddenly, rather than money being spent in building a good MVP, a strong team and community support through influencers' ratings or even through advertisements, airdrops have become an easy and attractive option and people are just getting lured to it.

Some of the communities are reaching 100,000 telegram users. I believe, those who write or talk about an ICO project through their social media channels and consider telegram group numbers a good yardstick to measure Hype factor, would need to think again. I would not hesitate to say that out of those many thousand Telegram users only just a few single digit percentage might actually turn out to be the supporter of the project, rest just waiting to receive their bounties.