The Venezuelan student scheme shows a good way forward for future airdrops, a small amount of USD value can mean a lot to students in countries with low exchange rates, maybe target a campaign to students in Africa, South America, South East Asia etc if that went viral could easily get loads of new users, sort of like what Facebook did, but target low exchange rate countries where 10 USD is worth jumping through some hoops.
Verifying students is probably quite possible too, avoid sock puppets.
In such countries, people are more interested in dollars than in bytes. think that the distribution should be accessible to all equally.