
  Want Me To Read Your Email? Pay Me.  - AndrewWarner
http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/29/want-me-to-read-your-email-pay-me/
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hnsummary
Article summary:

Michael Arrington hates reading his email and thinks you should pay him to
read it. Enter a service called Attention Acution that gives you a special
inbox and let’s people know how many emails you have in your inbox and place a
bid to have you read their email. If you read their email then you get paid.
Apparently the site is buggy and doesn’t work all the time so it’s unlikely it
will take off.

<http://hnsummary.com/2010/03/29/get-paid-to-read-your-email/>

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mrtron
It might make sense to learn from AllAdvantage.

If you are going to pay people to read email, people will generate thousands
of email accounts and auto-readers.

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westbywest
Spam notwithstanding, what's wrong with the usual methods for sorting email,
e.g. catchy wording in title, and filtering based on whether the sender is
familiar to you?

Admitted I'm not a celebrity like Arrington, but I really don't find myself
especially more likely to absorb email content that I'm apathetic about, even
if I get paid. And precisely because I'm no celebrity, I don't see how I could
be paid anything more than a pittance by this scheme, meaning someone would be
buying my attention span for very cheap.

I'll let the attention span devoted to writing this comment (provided free of
change) serve as an example of how I believe this scheme would drastically de-
value email readers' time.

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devinj
I think it'd be okay to be paid a pittance. In fact, I would hope the auction
lets people send emails for free. For people that don't get much email, then,
it's just like normal, no problems. If you get a lot, people will notice you
have 500 emails left unread and go "hm, maybe I should jump the queue". So
they pay a dollar. The biggest concern is that if you get a huge number of
emails a day, it's kind of sad that people that don't want to pay are pushed
down so far. I'm not sure how the service works, but maybe the queue could be
designed to balance money with time spent waiting?

I feel like I should dislike this idea, but I think I like it.

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neilk
Asking others to pay them to read email: a known sign of the anti-spam kook.

[http://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/you-might-
be.html#e-postag...](http://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/you-might-
be.html#e-postage)

However, Arrington's attention might actually be that valuable, if your
business plan involves a lot of investor hype. So perhaps it's not so much
internet kookery as it is general internet douchebaggery.

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staunch
It seems like it should set off alarm bells, but I actually like the idea. I'm
not sure how well it'd work in practice, but it might work very well. Kind of
the way Metafilter's $5 signup fee works.

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lsc
eh, I dono... Commercializing email seems like it will make it so you only
receive commercial email. I guess that could be good in some situations, but
it seems like most of the bidders will be people who /primarily/ send
commercial email, e.g. marketers; people I don't want to interact with. Sure,
I buy servers and co-lo space, but the last thing I need is a mailbox full of
spam from people trying to sell me that.

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naner
Wait... so you just have to _open_ the mails to get paid? What is there to
stop me from just going through and opening all of them without reading?

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ziadbc
What do you think of this model andrew? I have a prototype of a similar app
that is a little less blatant.

