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Facebook tests $1 fee for inbox access

casca 14y ago
This is access to your inbox for advertisers. For those who don't use Facebook, if you receive a message from someone who is not your "friend", it goes into a different folder called "Other". Many people don't know about this and there's no notification in the UI for received messages. Visually, it's treated in a similar way to your spam folder but with less visibility. I always assumed that the only reason for separating your Other folder so visually was to charge people to get out of it. I guess Facebook was waiting for more people to use their messaging platform as a replacement for email before pulling the trigger.
- tgrass 14y ago
  At a $1 per email, this may be for sales, but it won;t be for generic spam.
  - rory096 14y ago
    Which may be a good thing. What if Facebook harvests enough data that the "spam" we get is low in quantity and with very high probability it's something we actually want, as that price requires? If ultra-targeted advertising becomes viable as a model for Facebook, it'd be much less of a nuisance than just shoving ads in users' faces all the time. Value-added, even- it's reliably connecting users with markets they'd voluntarily participate in.
RyanZAG 14y ago
Just great - so someone who wants to spend $20 can have my phone beeping away? Does this get past banning a contact? Can you even ban a contact? What happens next, pay Facebook $10/month so others can't pay them $1 per message to spam you?
- lanstein 14y ago
  That's basically SMS in India in a nutshell from my understanding. Except I believe there's a third level allowing SMS spam.
- jgross206 14y ago
  That seems a bit alarmist. Someone who pays 20$ can have your phone beeping 20 times. That's a lot of money to pay for a mild annoyance.
- to3m 14y ago
  They could get you to bid against the spammers, perhaps. If somebody will pay $1 to send you a message, maybe you'll pay $1.10 not to receive it :) But if they feel their message is THAT important, perhaps they'd then pay $1.20 to ensure you get it...
- toki5 14y ago
  The article says that at the moment (realizing that this is still very early), users are limited to one message a week. I imagine that this will rise, but if they keep a relatively low limit on the amount you can send, I should think that spamming would be infeasible. It's also (again, currently) "not available to Brands."
- pavel_lishin 14y ago
  > Just great - so someone who wants to spend $20 can have my phone beeping away? I can already do this by paying $20 to upgrade to an unlimited SMS plan on my phone.
DannyBee 14y ago
Gee, I wonder how this will go over with privacy regulators. "We have given people meaningful privacy controls to prevent unwanted messages, but we let other people completely override them for small amounts of money"
- zaidf 14y ago
  Curious why spam is a concern for privacy regulators. Would you know why?
  - DannyBee 14y ago
    Because at least in Europe, they consider the right to be left alone part of privacy. If my privacy controls say you can't message me, you shouldn't be able to message me. Otherwise, they aren't privacy controls. It's not like you get to pull a name out of thin air and message it for a dollar, it tells you things about people you can't normally reach (IE normally have you blocked from sending messages), and lets you decide if you want to reach them anyway, despite the fact that you are normally blocked/put into other. The wonderful spin they put on this is: "For the receiver, this test allows them to hear from people who have an important message to send them." That important message could be "i'm stalking you, bitch", being sent from a throwaway facebook account. As the article points out it also allows you to send messages to people you aren't friends with, so you don't even have to have gotten them to friend you. Normally it would have gone into other and you'd likely never have looked.
    - ewolf 14y ago
      I think you misinterpret "being left alone". In the sense of being able to do something on your own without anyone being able to see what you're doing — yes. But the reception of unwanted messages, while annoying, does not seem to interfere with privacy, since you can still dismiss those messages and thus not let the sender know anything about you.
      - DannyBee 14y ago
nicholassmith 14y ago
This is horrible, and interesting! The biggest group to stand to make money off the back of Facebook is probably spammers, by charging a dollar they're either going to get really good spam or it'll still keep them away. Of course, if the spammers can Nigerian prince a few fattened gooses they'll take the $1 price as the entry fee and deducted it from the profits. Puzzled why anyone at Facebook thinks this is a remotely good idea, but you know, business model.
- Permit 14y ago
  $1.00 per message is extremely expensive for individuals who make their money spamming inboxes.
  - ceejayoz 14y ago
    Not if they're also stealing credit card numbers.
  - fredsted 14y ago
    Is it? You can send quite a few spam e-mails with a dollar, but with this, you're guaranteed your message will show up in someones inbox, that it won't be placed in the spam folder and it's legal to boot.
    - toki5 14y ago
      I realize there's value added to that it's specifically targeted spamming, but, yes, $1 per message is several orders of magnitude more expensive than normal spamming.
      - Retric 14y ago
        Not when you exclude spam that never makes it to a users inbox.
        Danieru 14y ago
motters 14y ago
This made me laugh. Mr Zuckerberg wants users to pay to send emails to each other? If so it must be a sign of how desperate Facebook is becoming to please shareholders.
uptown 14y ago
I just wish Facebook would deliver messages I've sent to strangers to their actual inbox. Example - I found somebody's wallet. Found that person on Facebook, and sent them a message. Never heard back, but I can only assume my message is sitting in their 'Other' inbox. Stuff like that makes it easy to not depend on the site for anything.
- Zimahl 14y ago
  Couldn't you do a friend request with a message in the friend request explaining who you are? I know linked in does this but I can't remember if Facebook does.
  - uptown 14y ago
    I actually tried that wondering the same thing - but they don't let you send any message with your request. Since they didn't, I rescinded the friend request since I was not interested in exposing my personal information to a complete stranger.
  - untog 14y ago
    Facebook used to, along with a "how do you know each other" box. Presumably neither were used heavily so they got rid of them.
- natrius 14y ago
  Isn't this exactly what they're making possible? Take a dollar out of the wallet and use that dollar to get in their inbox.
  - cbs 14y ago
    Nothing better than artificially creating a problem, just to charge for the solution!
  - uptown 14y ago
    Wallet had just a bank card and a metro card. Also, it's not my money to spend even if there was cash there. I ended up bringing it to the bank branch nearest where I found the wallet (Bank of America) who was also unhelpful. They told me that unless the wallet had been found in their branch they wouldn't contact the owner even though it had her name and photo on the bank card. Because of their unwillingness to help, I vowed to never become a customer of Bank of America.
dude_abides 14y ago
The official blog post: http://newsroom.fb.com/News/558/Update-to-Messaging-and-a-Test http://newsroom.fb.com/News/558/Update-to-Messaging-and-a-Te... This is particularly interesting: If you select Strict Filtering, you'll see mostly messages from friends in your Inbox. People who had the previous setting set to "friends" will have "Strict Filtering" on. Basically now you cannot opt out of getting messages from someone who pays facebook to message you. Interesting.
raheemm 14y ago
They should just switch to a subscription model ($10-$100/yr tiered pricing) and then offer those users super features like "killer privacy", "payments", "events", "shopping", etc. Free users can continue to get photos and advertising, like now. What's the risk? They could be more bold about making money in other ways besides advertising.
- paulhodge 14y ago
  Then a competitor could just provide the same "super" features for free. Facebook's best strategy is to profit off the network/user base itself, since that's something they have that no one else does.
ISL 14y ago
There's an elegance to it. As usual, the user is the product. It will be difficult for FB to really win in advertising spaces; there are a lot of other players. FB is making a play that states that there's an unserved market in sending personal messages to people who don't want them. They're probably right, it's only unclear how big that market might be. The best part? Once users tire of sponsored messages ending up in their "email", FB can offer a paid option to exclude them. If that works, then FB gets paid. As Mr. McBean said, "you can't teach a Sneetch", at least not quickly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sneetches_and_Other_Stories http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sneetches_and_Other_Stories
mikle 14y ago
I don't use Facebook much, so I wouldn't really care if this happened. Maybe people will join me in this empty GTalk ecosystem, at least until Google decides to monetize that :)
melvinmt 14y ago
Does this mean I can contact Zuckerberg for just a dollar? Sweet, been wanting to ask him some things.
codegeek 14y ago
I once posted an Ask Hn similar to this. I have always wondered about this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4322758 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4322758
k-mcgrady 14y ago
Interesting. I think I've read about Bill Gates suggesting this as the solution to email spam before. Charge everyone $1 per email and it will make most spam unsustainable. It seems like this would give people (who have a good reason) a way to contact you without your Facebook inbox getting filled with (more) spam.
- duaneb 14y ago
  I'd be OK with this as long as I could have somehow allow free communication with friends, family, etc.
- ErikAugust 14y ago
  Interesting but my Google Mail filter is becoming really good at parsing out spam. Even "technically I opted in but still spam".
duaneb 14y ago
This seems really scary until you realize $1 is prohibitively expensive for most advertisers unless they are very confident there will be a return on their investment.
bitsweet 14y ago
This is what Facebook eating LinkedIn's lunch looks like EDIT: Let me explain...LinkedIn is about to make just shy of 1 billon in revenue in 2012. Their dominant revenue stream is recruiting products where orgs/recruiters pay ~10K a year per seat to search linkedin and send X number of InMails a month. As developers this product is the source of much of the job spam you get each week.. Facebook has all the same connections/work exp/education that LinkedIn has...just for more people.
rm999 14y ago
>Several commentators and researchers have noted that imposing a financial cost on the sender may be the most effective way to discourage unwanted messages Sure, if you measure your performance on true positives. But what about false positives? What if I and the recipient will gain utility from me sending him a message, but I refuse to pay a dollar to ensure he will see it? I think google proved algorithmic spam protection works well. It may not work perfectly (and IMO has gotten slightly worse over time), but it gets you pretty darn close without adding a tax. Automatic protection feels far more 'efficient' than the proposed one. I hope facebook's trial proves this.
- Periodic 14y ago
  I think the reasoning is that if you aren't already connected and it isn't worth spending $1 to make sure the other person sees the message, then how much utility does it really have? I suppose there could be a case where the utility to you is low, but the utility to the user is very high, but in this case they are probably seeking you out and you should invest in cost-per-click/conversion advertising instead of cost-per-impression. Facebook's proposed model has a very high cost-per-impression, which is what weeds out much of the spam. You have to get a very high conversion rate before it becomes economical, which implies that the message was indeed relevant. In fact, being an inbox message probably increases the conversion rate over other communication methods (such as ads and spam)
  - rm999 14y ago
    The messages I get from non-friends are usually from old friends asking if I'm the correct rm999 (well, my real name). I think these messages do have a lot of utility, but I would never pay to send them. They also provide value to facebook by increasing the size of their social network. Uptown also brought up the semi-contrived (but still excellent) example of a found wallet, which is another case where the value to the sender is low but the global utility is high. Anyway, I get virtually zero e-mail spam and my e-mail address has been public for eight years. I don't see why facebook wants to shake things up. I consider spam a mostly solved problem.

casca 14y ago

This is access to your inbox for advertisers. For those who don't use Facebook, if you receive a message from someone who is not your "friend", it goes into a different folder called "Other". Many people don't know about this and there's no notification in the UI for received messages. Visually, it's treated in a similar way to your spam folder but with less visibility. I always assumed that the only reason for separating your Other folder so visually was to charge people to get out of it. I guess Facebook was waiting for more people to use their messaging platform as a replacement for email before pulling the trigger.

tgrass 14y ago
At a $1 per email, this may be for sales, but it won;t be for generic spam.
- rory096 14y ago
  Which may be a good thing. What if Facebook harvests enough data that the "spam" we get is low in quantity and with very high probability it's something we actually want, as that price requires? If ultra-targeted advertising becomes viable as a model for Facebook, it'd be much less of a nuisance than just shoving ads in users' faces all the time. Value-added, even- it's reliably connecting users with markets they'd voluntarily participate in.

RyanZAG 14y ago

Just great - so someone who wants to spend $20 can have my phone beeping away? Does this get past banning a contact? Can you even ban a contact? What happens next, pay Facebook $10/month so others can't pay them $1 per message to spam you?

lanstein 14y ago
That's basically SMS in India in a nutshell from my understanding. Except I believe there's a third level allowing SMS spam.
jgross206 14y ago
That seems a bit alarmist. Someone who pays 20$ can have your phone beeping 20 times. That's a lot of money to pay for a mild annoyance.
to3m 14y ago
They could get you to bid against the spammers, perhaps. If somebody will pay $1 to send you a message, maybe you'll pay $1.10 not to receive it :) But if they feel their message is THAT important, perhaps they'd then pay $1.20 to ensure you get it...
toki5 14y ago
The article says that at the moment (realizing that this is still very early), users are limited to one message a week. I imagine that this will rise, but if they keep a relatively low limit on the amount you can send, I should think that spamming would be infeasible. It's also (again, currently) "not available to Brands."
pavel_lishin 14y ago
> Just great - so someone who wants to spend $20 can have my phone beeping away? I can already do this by paying $20 to upgrade to an unlimited SMS plan on my phone.

DannyBee 14y ago

Gee, I wonder how this will go over with privacy regulators. "We have given people meaningful privacy controls to prevent unwanted messages, but we let other people completely override them for small amounts of money"

zaidf 14y ago
Curious why spam is a concern for privacy regulators. Would you know why?
- DannyBee 14y ago
  Because at least in Europe, they consider the right to be left alone part of privacy. If my privacy controls say you can't message me, you shouldn't be able to message me. Otherwise, they aren't privacy controls. It's not like you get to pull a name out of thin air and message it for a dollar, it tells you things about people you can't normally reach (IE normally have you blocked from sending messages), and lets you decide if you want to reach them anyway, despite the fact that you are normally blocked/put into other. The wonderful spin they put on this is: "For the receiver, this test allows them to hear from people who have an important message to send them." That important message could be "i'm stalking you, bitch", being sent from a throwaway facebook account. As the article points out it also allows you to send messages to people you aren't friends with, so you don't even have to have gotten them to friend you. Normally it would have gone into other and you'd likely never have looked.
  - ewolf 14y ago
    I think you misinterpret "being left alone". In the sense of being able to do something on your own without anyone being able to see what you're doing — yes. But the reception of unwanted messages, while annoying, does not seem to interfere with privacy, since you can still dismiss those messages and thus not let the sender know anything about you.
    - DannyBee 14y ago

nicholassmith 14y ago

This is horrible, and interesting! The biggest group to stand to make money off the back of Facebook is probably spammers, by charging a dollar they're either going to get really good spam or it'll still keep them away. Of course, if the spammers can Nigerian prince a few fattened gooses they'll take the $1 price as the entry fee and deducted it from the profits. Puzzled why anyone at Facebook thinks this is a remotely good idea, but you know, business model.

Permit 14y ago
$1.00 per message is extremely expensive for individuals who make their money spamming inboxes.
- ceejayoz 14y ago
  Not if they're also stealing credit card numbers.
- fredsted 14y ago
  Is it? You can send quite a few spam e-mails with a dollar, but with this, you're guaranteed your message will show up in someones inbox, that it won't be placed in the spam folder and it's legal to boot.
  - toki5 14y ago
    I realize there's value added to that it's specifically targeted spamming, but, yes, $1 per message is several orders of magnitude more expensive than normal spamming.
    - Retric 14y ago
      Not when you exclude spam that never makes it to a users inbox.
      - Danieru 14y ago

motters 14y ago

This made me laugh. Mr Zuckerberg wants users to pay to send emails to each other? If so it must be a sign of how desperate Facebook is becoming to please shareholders.

uptown 14y ago

I just wish Facebook would deliver messages I've sent to strangers to their actual inbox. Example - I found somebody's wallet. Found that person on Facebook, and sent them a message. Never heard back, but I can only assume my message is sitting in their 'Other' inbox. Stuff like that makes it easy to not depend on the site for anything.

Zimahl 14y ago
Couldn't you do a friend request with a message in the friend request explaining who you are? I know linked in does this but I can't remember if Facebook does.
- uptown 14y ago
  I actually tried that wondering the same thing - but they don't let you send any message with your request. Since they didn't, I rescinded the friend request since I was not interested in exposing my personal information to a complete stranger.
- untog 14y ago
  Facebook used to, along with a "how do you know each other" box. Presumably neither were used heavily so they got rid of them.
natrius 14y ago
Isn't this exactly what they're making possible? Take a dollar out of the wallet and use that dollar to get in their inbox.
- cbs 14y ago
  Nothing better than artificially creating a problem, just to charge for the solution!
- uptown 14y ago
  Wallet had just a bank card and a metro card. Also, it's not my money to spend even if there was cash there. I ended up bringing it to the bank branch nearest where I found the wallet (Bank of America) who was also unhelpful. They told me that unless the wallet had been found in their branch they wouldn't contact the owner even though it had her name and photo on the bank card. Because of their unwillingness to help, I vowed to never become a customer of Bank of America.

dude_abides 14y ago

The official blog post: http://newsroom.fb.com/News/558/Update-to-Messaging-and-a-Test http://newsroom.fb.com/News/558/Update-to-Messaging-and-a-Te... This is particularly interesting: If you select Strict Filtering, you'll see mostly messages from friends in your Inbox. People who had the previous setting set to "friends" will have "Strict Filtering" on. Basically now you cannot opt out of getting messages from someone who pays facebook to message you. Interesting.

raheemm 14y ago

They should just switch to a subscription model ($10-$100/yr tiered pricing) and then offer those users super features like "killer privacy", "payments", "events", "shopping", etc. Free users can continue to get photos and advertising, like now. What's the risk? They could be more bold about making money in other ways besides advertising.

paulhodge 14y ago
Then a competitor could just provide the same "super" features for free. Facebook's best strategy is to profit off the network/user base itself, since that's something they have that no one else does.

ISL 14y ago

There's an elegance to it. As usual, the user is the product. It will be difficult for FB to really win in advertising spaces; there are a lot of other players. FB is making a play that states that there's an unserved market in sending personal messages to people who don't want them. They're probably right, it's only unclear how big that market might be. The best part? Once users tire of sponsored messages ending up in their "email", FB can offer a paid option to exclude them. If that works, then FB gets paid. As Mr. McBean said, "you can't teach a Sneetch", at least not quickly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sneetches_and_Other_Stories http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sneetches_and_Other_Stories

mikle 14y ago

I don't use Facebook much, so I wouldn't really care if this happened. Maybe people will join me in this empty GTalk ecosystem, at least until Google decides to monetize that :)

melvinmt 14y ago

Does this mean I can contact Zuckerberg for just a dollar? Sweet, been wanting to ask him some things.

codegeek 14y ago

I once posted an Ask Hn similar to this. I have always wondered about this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4322758 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4322758

k-mcgrady 14y ago

Interesting. I think I've read about Bill Gates suggesting this as the solution to email spam before. Charge everyone $1 per email and it will make most spam unsustainable. It seems like this would give people (who have a good reason) a way to contact you without your Facebook inbox getting filled with (more) spam.

duaneb 14y ago
I'd be OK with this as long as I could have somehow allow free communication with friends, family, etc.
ErikAugust 14y ago
Interesting but my Google Mail filter is becoming really good at parsing out spam. Even "technically I opted in but still spam".

duaneb 14y ago

This seems really scary until you realize $1 is prohibitively expensive for most advertisers unless they are very confident there will be a return on their investment.

bitsweet 14y ago

This is what Facebook eating LinkedIn's lunch looks like EDIT: Let me explain...LinkedIn is about to make just shy of 1 billon in revenue in 2012. Their dominant revenue stream is recruiting products where orgs/recruiters pay ~10K a year per seat to search linkedin and send X number of InMails a month. As developers this product is the source of much of the job spam you get each week.. Facebook has all the same connections/work exp/education that LinkedIn has...just for more people.

rm999 14y ago

>Several commentators and researchers have noted that imposing a financial cost on the sender may be the most effective way to discourage unwanted messages Sure, if you measure your performance on true positives. But what about false positives? What if I and the recipient will gain utility from me sending him a message, but I refuse to pay a dollar to ensure he will see it? I think google proved algorithmic spam protection works well. It may not work perfectly (and IMO has gotten slightly worse over time), but it gets you pretty darn close without adding a tax. Automatic protection feels far more 'efficient' than the proposed one. I hope facebook's trial proves this.

Periodic 14y ago
I think the reasoning is that if you aren't already connected and it isn't worth spending $1 to make sure the other person sees the message, then how much utility does it really have? I suppose there could be a case where the utility to you is low, but the utility to the user is very high, but in this case they are probably seeking you out and you should invest in cost-per-click/conversion advertising instead of cost-per-impression. Facebook's proposed model has a very high cost-per-impression, which is what weeds out much of the spam. You have to get a very high conversion rate before it becomes economical, which implies that the message was indeed relevant. In fact, being an inbox message probably increases the conversion rate over other communication methods (such as ads and spam)
- rm999 14y ago
  The messages I get from non-friends are usually from old friends asking if I'm the correct rm999 (well, my real name). I think these messages do have a lot of utility, but I would never pay to send them. They also provide value to facebook by increasing the size of their social network. Uptown also brought up the semi-contrived (but still excellent) example of a found wallet, which is another case where the value to the sender is low but the global utility is high. Anyway, I get virtually zero e-mail spam and my e-mail address has been public for eight years. I don't see why facebook wants to shake things up. I consider spam a mostly solved problem.