Any referral type of thing is beneficial only if you have a lot of joiners, IMO. I have tried some of that, but I haven't been successful enough that it's significant. In a way, I think what's important with that is to make sure that you are marketing it like websites, etc. Has anybody started theirs yet?
I started a big thread back in golden days of our local forums. I created those in our 2 of the big and most popular local forum sites
(Symb and PD) and successfully yield a good number of referrals to exchange wallets, faucets, PTC, micro-earning sites, etc. For reference, I just tried to find my old threads there but I'm unable to find it now
(Symb was rebranded to Mobilirian and other threads were deleted while PD is offline for long now).I can say that the same traffic I received in those forums is also the same as marketing on a certain website
(of course it excludes those top sites) that's why if I will apply that activity today, I doubt the traffic will be the same. That was around 2015-2016 where people here didn't have much an idea about crypto in general. I doubt I can repeat the same activity today since lots of things happened already and crypto become popular as it progresses.
The bottom line, I really don't see much improvement in terms of gathering referrals amid with the current situation. Still, it depends on the effort and ability to target a specific audience. And the worst, even spending tons of money, we aren't sure if we are really hitting our target impressions.