Sure, but I don't think you can compare free airdrops with other affiliate programs because other affiliate programs don't have people actively trying to steal money from you. Well, I mean, sure Google has to protect their clients from bots that click on competitor ads, but Google didn't have that system from day one either, they built it as it started to happen to them and they grew with the scammers as they were trying to fix new methods that scammers came up with, and they are probably still doing that. That is what Byteball also did, the fee/transaction referral system was proven to work well until there came these bots who started scanning the DAG database.
I am little bit salty because I am not actually very happy about the quality of the post that I have seen here. With these posts that I have written now on Steemit, I have learned that blogging for money is not easy, good content is hard to write, especially if you do not have a knowledge what you are writing about, but some of these posts about Byteball airdrop have been just plain lazy content creation. Blows my mind when you see how much upvotes some of these posts are getting.
My personal favorite is this one https://busy.org/@teamhumble/88ya1df6 and I hope there will be more good content like this when this airdop free money mania cools down.