
Facebook tests $1 fee for inbox access - pragmatictester
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57560256-93/facebook-tests-$1-fee-for-inbox-access/
======
dude_abides
The official blog post: [http://newsroom.fb.com/News/558/Update-to-Messaging-
and-a-Te...](http://newsroom.fb.com/News/558/Update-to-Messaging-and-a-Test)

This is particularly interesting:

 _If you select Strict Filtering, you'll see mostly messages from friends in
your Inbox. People who had the previous setting set to "friends" will have
"Strict Filtering" on._

Basically now you cannot opt out of getting messages from someone who pays
facebook to message you. Interesting.

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uptown
I just wish Facebook would deliver messages I've sent to strangers to their
actual inbox. Example - I found somebody's wallet. Found that person on
Facebook, and sent them a message. Never heard back, but I can only assume my
message is sitting in their 'Other' inbox.

Stuff like that makes it easy to not depend on the site for anything.

~~~
Zimahl
Couldn't you do a friend request with a message in the friend request
explaining who you are? I know linked in does this but I can't remember if
Facebook does.

~~~
uptown
I actually tried that wondering the same thing - but they don't let you send
any message with your request. Since they didn't, I rescinded the friend
request since I was not interested in exposing my personal information to a
complete stranger.

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casca
This is access to your inbox for advertisers.

For those who don't use Facebook, if you receive a message from someone who is
not your "friend", it goes into a different folder called "Other". Many people
don't know about this and there's no notification in the UI for received
messages. Visually, it's treated in a similar way to your spam folder but with
less visibility.

I always assumed that the only reason for separating your Other folder so
visually was to charge people to get out of it. I guess Facebook was waiting
for more people to use their messaging platform as a replacement for email
before pulling the trigger.

~~~
tgrass
At a $1 per email, this may be for sales, but it won;t be for generic spam.

~~~
rory096
Which may be a good thing. What if Facebook harvests enough data that the
"spam" we get is low in quantity and with very high probability it's something
we actually _want_ , as that price requires? If ultra-targeted advertising
becomes viable as a model for Facebook, it'd be much less of a nuisance than
just shoving ads in users' faces all the time. Value-added, even- it's
reliably connecting users with markets they'd voluntarily participate in.

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nicholassmith
This is horrible, and interesting! The biggest group to stand to make money
off the back of Facebook is probably spammers, by charging a dollar they're
either going to get _really_ good spam or it'll still keep them away. Of
course, if the spammers can Nigerian prince a few fattened gooses they'll take
the $1 price as the entry fee and deducted it from the profits.

Puzzled why anyone at Facebook thinks this is a remotely good idea, but you
know, business model.

~~~
Permit
$1.00 per message is extremely expensive for individuals who make their money
spamming inboxes.

~~~
fredsted
Is it? You can send quite a few spam e-mails with a dollar, but with this,
you're guaranteed your message will show up in someones inbox, that it won't
be placed in the spam folder _and_ it's legal to boot.

~~~
toki5
I realize there's value added to that it's specifically targeted spamming,
but, yes, $1 per message is several orders of magnitude more expensive than
normal spamming.

~~~
Retric
Not when you exclude spam that never makes it to a users inbox.

~~~
Danieru
The marginal cost of sending bulk spam is the opportunity cost of the botnet.

$1 a message is a one followed by the zeros you get from your cat playing with
the zero key times more expensive than bulk spam.

~~~
Retric
That's far from accurage.

Let's use some vary pessimistic estimates.

183 billion spam messages a day * 1% make it to inbox / 10,000 people world
wide making spam / 5$ per person per day = 36,600 messages dollar. Which need
to be vary garbled to make it though the inbox so they tend to be instantly
ignored by most people.

PS: I have seen more detailed estimates that suggest each read spam message
costs .1c to 10c depending on how targeted the campaign is.

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RyanZAG
Just great - so someone who wants to spend $20 can have my phone beeping away?
Does this get past banning a contact? Can you even ban a contact?

What happens next, pay Facebook $10/month so others can't pay them $1 per
message to spam you?

~~~
to3m
They could get you to bid against the spammers, perhaps. If somebody will pay
$1 to send you a message, maybe you'll pay $1.10 not to receive it :)

But if they feel their message is THAT important, perhaps they'd then pay
$1.20 to ensure you get it...

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melvinmt
Does this mean I can contact Zuckerberg for just a dollar? Sweet, been wanting
to ask him some things.

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rm999
>Several commentators and researchers have noted that imposing a financial
cost on the sender may be the most effective way to discourage unwanted
messages

Sure, if you measure your performance on true positives. But what about false
positives? What if I and the recipient will gain utility from me sending him a
message, but I refuse to pay a dollar to ensure he will see it?

I think google proved algorithmic spam protection works well. It may not work
perfectly (and IMO has gotten slightly worse over time), but it gets you
pretty darn close without adding a tax. Automatic protection feels far more
'efficient' than the proposed one. I hope facebook's trial proves this.

~~~
Periodic
I think the reasoning is that if you aren't already connected and it isn't
worth spending $1 to make sure the other person sees the message, then how
much utility does it really have?

I suppose there could be a case where the utility to you is low, but the
utility to the user is very high, but in this case they are probably seeking
you out and you should invest in cost-per-click/conversion advertising instead
of cost-per-impression.

Facebook's proposed model has a very high cost-per-impression, which is what
weeds out much of the spam. You have to get a very high conversion rate before
it becomes economical, which implies that the message was indeed relevant. In
fact, being an inbox message probably increases the conversion rate over other
communication methods (such as ads and spam)

~~~
rm999
The messages I get from non-friends are usually from old friends asking if I'm
the correct rm999 (well, my real name). I think these messages do have a lot
of utility, but I would never pay to send them. They also provide value to
facebook by increasing the size of their social network. Uptown also brought
up the semi-contrived (but still excellent) example of a found wallet, which
is another case where the value to the sender is low but the global utility is
high.

Anyway, I get virtually zero e-mail spam and my e-mail address has been public
for eight years. I don't see why facebook wants to shake things up. I consider
spam a mostly solved problem.

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DannyBee
Gee, I wonder how this will go over with privacy regulators.

"We have given people meaningful privacy controls to prevent unwanted
messages, but we let other people completely override them for small amounts
of money"

~~~
zaidf
Curious why _spam_ is a concern for privacy regulators. Would you know why?

~~~
DannyBee
Because at least in Europe, they consider the right to be left alone part of
privacy. If my privacy controls say you can't message me, you shouldn't be
able to message me. Otherwise, they aren't privacy controls.

It's not like you get to pull a name out of thin air and message it for a
dollar, it tells you things about people you can't normally reach (IE normally
have you blocked from sending messages), and lets you decide if you want to
reach them anyway, despite the fact that you are normally blocked/put into
other.

The wonderful spin they put on this is: "For the receiver, this test allows
them to hear from people who have an important message to send them."

That important message could be "i'm stalking you, bitch", being sent from a
throwaway facebook account. As the article points out it also allows you to
send messages to people you aren't friends with, so you don't even have to
have gotten them to friend you. Normally it would have gone into other and
you'd likely never have looked.

~~~
zaidf
_The wonderful spin they put on this is: "For the receiver, this test allows
them to hear from people who have an important message to send them."_

But you are dismissing a _perfectly_ legitimate use. I had no idea there even
existed an "Other" folder and when I did find out, there were a half dozen
legitimate mails from longlost friends of various types.

I can see the privacy concern here but to call the above "spin" is being
ignorant to a very legitimate use case. The $1/msg seems like an interesting
compromise - if someone legitimate _really_ wanted to reach me, they probably
wouldn't mind spending a dollar.

~~~
DannyBee
I'm not dismissing it, i'm saying it's not legitimate as they had set up
filtering (and probably why they changed the filtering settings along with
this, as the blog post shows).

If i have a setting that says "i only want to hear from friends", then i only
want to hear from friends. That's the choice I am making about who i want to
hear from. You can argue i'm not thinking this choice through, or am ignorant
of the consequences, but that's not the same argument.

If they want a setting for "I also want to hear from people who are willing to
spend money to reach me" (or some better pr worded version of this), great,
i'm not opposed to that.

~~~
toki5
This does seem dismissive to me.

The entire point of this exercise is to address zaidf's use case, which is
trying to attach importance to messages that are outside the realm of
Facebook's "important" data points. If they aren't your friend, and they
aren't a friend of your friends', but they still have an important message --
how can we identify this?

The obvious hope here is that they can identify important messages by
attaching a small (but real) cost to them, while limiting abuse by way of
rates and maybe tweaking the cost.

You may not _want_ these messages, but the fact remains that there are
important messages that go missed because they can't smartly be deemed
"important" in the Facebook ecosystem. Maybe there are sinister intentions
beneath the surface, but this is still a legitimate attempt to solve a
legitimate problem.

~~~
DannyBee
It's only dismissive if you assume the weird thought that facebook is the only
way to reach me. The entire point of the exercise is to make money, let's be
clear about that, it's not about making sure people can reach me with
"important" messages.

You seem to assume that facebook can or should be the way to reach people who
have explicitly said "friends only" for their facebook messages.

Again, if i've said "i only want to see messages from friends", and something
"important" goes missed as a result, that is the tradeoff _I_ chose. The rest
of this argument seems to be "you chose the wrong tradeoff or we think you
don't really understand what you are doing so we are doing our best to surface
stuff that you explicitly said you didn't care about"

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ISL
There's an elegance to it. As usual, the user is the product.

It will be difficult for FB to really win in advertising spaces; there are a
lot of other players. FB is making a play that states that there's an unserved
market in sending personal messages to people who don't want them. They're
probably right, it's only unclear how big that market might be.

The best part? Once users tire of sponsored messages ending up in their
"email", FB can offer a paid option to exclude them. If that works, then FB
gets paid.

As Mr. McBean said, "you can't teach a Sneetch", at least not quickly.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sneetches_and_Other_Stories>

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bitsweet
This is what Facebook eating LinkedIn's lunch looks like

EDIT: Let me explain...LinkedIn is about to make just shy of 1 billon in
revenue in 2012. Their dominant revenue stream is recruiting products where
orgs/recruiters pay ~10K a year per seat to search linkedin and send X number
of InMails a month. As developers this product is the source of much of the
job spam you get each week.. Facebook has all the same connections/work
exp/education that LinkedIn has...just for more people.

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motters
This made me laugh. Mr Zuckerberg wants users to pay to send emails to each
other? If so it must be a sign of how desperate Facebook is becoming to please
shareholders.

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raheemm
They should just switch to a subscription model ($10-$100/yr tiered pricing)
and then offer those users super features like "killer privacy", "payments",
"events", "shopping", etc. Free users can continue to get photos and
advertising, like now. What's the risk? They could be more bold about making
money in other ways besides advertising.

~~~
paulhodge
Then a competitor could just provide the same "super" features for free.
Facebook's best strategy is to profit off the network/user base itself, since
that's something they have that no one else does.

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k-mcgrady
Interesting. I think I've read about Bill Gates suggesting this as the
solution to email spam before. Charge everyone $1 per email and it will make
most spam unsustainable. It seems like this would give people (who have a good
reason) a way to contact you without your Facebook inbox getting filled with
(more) spam.

~~~
ErikAugust
Interesting but my Google Mail filter is becoming really good at parsing out
spam. Even "technically I opted in but still spam".

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codegeek
I once posted an Ask Hn similar to this. I have always wondered about this
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4322758>

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mikle
I don't use Facebook much, so I wouldn't really care if this happened. Maybe
people will join me in this empty GTalk ecosystem, at least until Google
decides to monetize that :)

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duaneb
This seems really scary until you realize $1 is prohibitively expensive for
most advertisers unless they are very confident there will be a return on
their investment.

