I was part of a startup years ago that did many of those things and much more. I still won't go into the details of what it was that my cofounder did, but it made a big difference.
It was a social networking site, before social networking sites really existed (circa 2000). I remember when the site consisted of me, him, his mom and our kindest friends. Got maybe a few hundred unique visitors per day, at best.
Then he did X and suddenly traffic spiked. It was a thousand uniques a day. Then tens of thousands. Then it got picked up by google. He did even more questionable things and traffic increased even more. Next thing we knew, it had 200,000+ registered users and was making $50k/month.
None of those things he did ever came back to haunt us. The site itself was kind of sketch (much more myspace than facebook), so that might have helped. I wouldn't do any of the things he did for any legitimate startup that I found. At the same time, it seemed like it worked. Once you have "critical mass" then the entire situation changes.
Just an anecdote to answer your question. Obviously YMMV.
Fine. In broad terms, he leveraged the file sharing networks of the time. He put the name of our site on files that were shared very often and we had our college friends seed them on various services. It seemed crazy at first, but there is a big difference between no one seeing your name and thousands of people seeing your name. In retrospect, it was a brilliant move.
My point was that critical mass and viral growth are powerful concepts, and some times all it takes is one little push to get things moving.
This isn't unethical. This is a brilliant marketing tactic. (Putting the name in there, not the actual sharing, which I guess is unethical depending on what you're sharing.)
i would consider soliciting someone else go share files (probably illegally) with the explicit purpose of advertising your website to be marginal at best.
It was a social networking site, before social networking sites really existed (circa 2000). I remember when the site consisted of me, him, his mom and our kindest friends. Got maybe a few hundred unique visitors per day, at best.
Then he did X and suddenly traffic spiked. It was a thousand uniques a day. Then tens of thousands. Then it got picked up by google. He did even more questionable things and traffic increased even more. Next thing we knew, it had 200,000+ registered users and was making $50k/month.
None of those things he did ever came back to haunt us. The site itself was kind of sketch (much more myspace than facebook), so that might have helped. I wouldn't do any of the things he did for any legitimate startup that I found. At the same time, it seemed like it worked. Once you have "critical mass" then the entire situation changes.
Just an anecdote to answer your question. Obviously YMMV.