

Facebook Will Let People You Don't Know Message Your Inbox For $1 - OJKoukaz
https://mashable.com/2012/12/20/facebook-pay-for-messages/

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pudquick
I think Facebook is on the right path with this as a potential money making
idea.

However, they need some modifications if they don't want to piss off their
users in implementing it.

Here's my suggestion(s):

Let users specify how much it should cost to contact them, and let them keep a
percentage of every dollar over $1. Then let marketing messengers set a
'maximum cost' amount - if it's too costly, they won't send.

Don't want to be messaged? Set your price insanely high.

Don't mind being messaged as long as you get something out of it? Set it to
$2-$5.

Win for everyone.

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mattj
One big issue here (solvable, but something to think about): this would make
messages a source for money laundering, which I'd bet fb would like to avoid.

Then again, they already deal with this with fb credits, so maybe this
wouldn't be too taxing to deal with.

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wtvanhest
If the percentage kept by facebook is higher than the cost of money laundering
this won't be a factor.

For example, there are probably few people willing to launder money at a cost
of 90%, and 10% seems like the amount FB would pay.

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loceng
Direct Mail spam. Even if this is something some businesses will pay for, and
even if it isn't a lot of messages, it is still an annoyance.

Would there be 1,000 businesses willing to spend $1 million each to send a
message to a million people? That's $1 billion. Can messages be targeted
enough and give a good enough ROI? Will users be pissed off and dismiss
businesses that put ads into their private inbox?

More negatives than positives, IMHO..

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lukasb
Set caps on spam and auction the space, then. If the price of getting to your
inbox is $10 people will have to have a really good reason for getting in
touch.

I'm usually anti-FB but I'm curious to see where this goes.

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gcr
Or, set the price to be a function of the number of messages the sender sent
per day.

E.g. If I've sent `s` messages per day averaged over the last N days, the next
message that I send should cost (rounded to the nearest penny):

    
    
       1.01^(s-1)
    

That'll put a damper on it right quick. Sending 100 messages will cost
$168.79, sending 200 will cost $625.35.

~~~
loceng
I don't see this happening, as Facebook has no trouble abusing the userbase.

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brudgers
Think of every company that has sent you at least three pieces of junk mail.

That's the barrier to entry imposed by a dollar on direct marketers.

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6ren
So expensive, this would need to be targeted extraordinarily well for it to be
worthwhile for advertisers. Which is possible, because fb knows so much more
about you than even google.

When ads are targeted _well enough_ , they stop being spam, and start becoming
a welcome service. The question is whether they have reached that threshold.

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jmillikin
Unsolicited commercial mail is _always_ spam. If I post a message to my
private about my fridge making funny sounds, that doesn't mean I want to
receive a FB message from HardwareStore about their appliance selection.

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jQueryIsAwesome
Its not technically mail (is an internal message system) and you don't hold
that strict standard for anything else do you?, e.g. all tv commercials are
spam because they show unsolicited commercial information, all billboard are
spam...

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pepr
Actually, yes in my viewpoint pretty much every billboard is spam. I've yet to
see a billboard that informed me of something useful to me personally. (Let
alone at an appropriate time! Is me driving on a highway an appropriate time
to let me know that I should buy something? Hell no.)

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blueprint
This sounds just like a recently posted startup,

"Want to chat with inaccessible people? Pay them, not Facebook"

<https://www.gramicon.com/pages/howto>

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tedunangst
So Facebook implements an anti-spam measure that people have been clamoring
for since the early days of slashdot and that makes them the bad guys?

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georgemcbay
How do you figure this qualifies as an anti-spam measure when it is giving
spammers a tool to reach me that they didn't have before?

