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Comment by pudquick | Hacker News Reader

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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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.

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.

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