The more people that prepare for these airdrops, the smaller the rewards.
If we're to compare how Dogs performed with their rewards to that of Hamster Kombat I think I do agree with your thoughts that the number of participants in an airdrop project also influences the value of the rewards to be given. Dogs had a few participants and not less than about two months or so, they airdropped their rewards to the small community and it was large. But HK the level of hype got a lot of involved which probably wasn't what the developers envisioned. In some cases, it leads to postponements and extension of snapshots and listing date just to accommodate the larger community.