Facebook Will Let People You Don't Know Message Your Inbox For $1 | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Will Let People You Don't Know Message Your Inbox For $1

mashable.com

43 pointsOJKoukaz21 comments

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.

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.

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.

The merchants would still need to use credit cards, so money laundering would not be an issue.

There is already a way to buy a prospect's attention and it's to give a $50-100 gift card or Amazon gift certificate. Facebook doesn't take a cut. At lower ends there are small iTunes gift cards, Starbucks and so on. Qualifying prospects is difficult because of the preference to approach without paying, and because people who estimate their time loss worth less than the gift will sometimes lie about their suitability in order to receive it. Because of all these considerations, it's always going to be a narrow market, and Facebook needs to focus on huge markets to make enough for their investors.

There is a big different between a $10 - $100 gift card and $1 per targeted message

My point is that the $1 message would only want to be seen by people who would make more from it than they value the time spent to read it, and companies would only want to send to people who they want to reach for the money, and could not reach for less - and the region between those two constraints is shrunk by the middleman's cut. I'd guess that mostly the only people who want to sit through $1 spam are on a boring conference call or unemployed, people who aren't good prospects. The better prospects would rather do an hour of consulting or work on a promotion.

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..

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.

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.

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

Captchas?

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.

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.

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.

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...

all billboard are spam

Not an unprecedented position: http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/73/Sao_Paulo_A_City_Withou...

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.)

This sounds just like a recently posted startup,

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

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

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?

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?

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