Well a newspaper is different, few contributors and many readers. Normal chat is either 1 to 1 or a small group of people in a channel/room. Just like email,

Well a newspaper is different, few contributors and many readers. Normal chat is either 1 to 1 or a small group of people in a channel/room. Just like email, I'd happily pay a small amount, say $0.10 to email a person the first time. Especially since even a small fee, negligible to most would be catastrophically expensive to spammers. Might also create an income stream so that it would be easier to compete with gmail, microsoft, and yahoo. As spam bots become more common on social and messaging networks I don't see why it couldn't be a similarly effective measure.