Facebook Charging $100 to Message Mark Zuckerberg

http://mashable.com/2013/01/11/facebook-message-mark-zuckerberg

by rustc • 14 years ago

57 67 14 years ago

Small price really and he probably reads them, unless a lot of people pony up that $100. He's the founder /CEO or the world's most used site and worth north of $20 Billion...

EwanG• 14 years ago

I was going to say, presuming that they guarantee delivery $100 would be cheap to get an audience for a pitch of one form or another. Still, I suspect his Facebook account is at least monitored (if not primarily run by) his admin - which might blunt the utility.

arscan• 14 years ago

I would be highly surprised if he lets other people manage his Facebook account. He seems to firmly believe that the type of social interaction that facebook facilitates is the way of the future. By not using it himself, he would be admitting that maybe its just a waste of time... which is something that I doubt that he would let himself do.

josephagoss• 14 years ago

@tubbo (dead), Mark is actually worth more than Jobs was, mainly because most of his (Jobs) wealth was in Disney shares and the $2-3 billion worth of Apple shares were paid to him. If Jobs kept hold of his founding shares then yeah, Jobs might of became richer than Gates, but he sold all but 1 share when he was forced out.

jsymolon• 14 years ago

His paper worth maybe not his value (IMHO). He got lucky and his team pulled Facebook through the rough times till the network effect kicked in and everyone had to be on Facebook.

He's got 1 hit and I rather pay another guy with multiple hits (and failures) that $300/hr.

I want the experience not a lottery ticket.

OGinparadise2• 14 years ago

" He got lucky and his team pulled Facebook through the rough times till the network effect kicked in and everyone had to be on Facebook."

Lucky for 8 years with all those decisions and all those competitors? Luck alone isn't it

jweir• 14 years ago

Now this would be great if I could turn this on for my inbox and set the price.

mtgx• 14 years ago

And you get 70%.

SODaniel• 14 years ago

$100 to send, and how much to guarantee that young Mr. Zuck actually READS the message? :)

gavinlynch3• 14 years ago

Why would he bother to read them? I certainly wouldn't read anything a random facebook user sent me. Let alone if my time was worth what his time is worth.

Besides, what of interest could he possibly be sent?

netcan• 14 years ago

Because he's charging to send them. It's not nice charging $100 to send you a message and ignoring it.

ssharp• 14 years ago

I definitely wouldn't call someone paying $100 to send him a message a random Facebook user. A certain type of Facebook user yes, but the randomness is coming from a very small segment of Facebook's overall audience.

Steve Jobs' one sentence (if even that) replies to people who sent him emails are a fun part of his legacy at Apple. Maybe Zuck is trying to strengthen his image as czar of Facebook, powerful but still social.

dudurocha3• 14 years ago

Linkedin Actually guarantees that they will read your message, or they will give your money back.

jiggy20112• 14 years ago

By read, means somebody clicked on that page?

eel• 14 years ago

They guarantee that you will receive a response from an InMail within X days, or you get your InMail credit back.

analyst74• 14 years ago

I'm curious, how is this different from normal messages?

Edit: after thinking about it, I guess the fact you're paying to message someone would impress the recipient, thus enticing them to reply.

BryantD• 14 years ago

You know, if LinkedIn sent a percentage of that money on to the user, I'd be more likely to read the recruiting spam.

mikeweiss• 14 years ago

Brilliant, wonder how much $$ this feature will bring in.

ojr• 14 years ago

brings a whole new definition to "money talks"

optymizer• 14 years ago

Doesn't work for my account :/

sheri• 14 years ago

I think this is really cool. The price point will definitely deter random spammers who just want to talk to Mark. But it is low enough for someone who wants to reach out to Mark to be feasible. If I had a brilliant idea I wanted Mark to know about, I'd be stoked. There is no guarantee that he will read it, but if someone paid 100$ to message him, he might be intrigued.

Most likely he has some folks to review those messages, and bring a (select) few to his attention.

uptown2• 14 years ago

You want to pay Mark $100 to take your idea?

why-el• 14 years ago

To listen to it. Comment too pedantic.

loceng• 14 years ago

And knowing how clear Facebook tries to be (sarcasm) - they will surely let you know he might not be reading your $100 message or even hear about it, if that's the case.

michaelochurch2• 14 years ago

I think some credits-based system (Quora?) based on quality of some kind of internet activity would be better. I agree on the use of scarcity to remove noise from clogged communication channels, but there are fairer ways to do scarcity.

$100 is nothing for me (and astronomically more of a nothing for Zuck) if there's a career benefit, but it's a substantial amount of money for most people in the world.

corporalagumbo• 14 years ago

Yeah, ideally a system like this would scale in relation both to the desirability of the recipient and the wealth of the sender, though not completely for the latter - wealth should always be some form of advantage.

slig• 14 years ago

> If I had a brilliant idea I wanted Mark to know about, I'd be stoked.

(...)

> Zuck: People just submitted it.

> Zuck: I don't know why.

> Zuck: They "trust me"

> Zuck: Dumb fucks.

prawks3• 14 years ago

This really is a hilarious play when you take his reputation into account.

dspillett• 14 years ago

That quote is taken a bit out of context methinks.

As much as I might dislike or distrust the man, and might consider $100 worth the chance to send a one-off drunken insult, I can see that intended as self deprecating humour. I do it about myself all the time: "what sort of fool would trust the likes of me with that" said to the person who has just indeed trusted me with what-ever "that" is, for instance.

goatforce5• 14 years ago

At one point if you tried to message Tom on MySpace it would take you in to a non-standard UX flow where it would try to nudge you in messaging their support people instead.

jbrooksuk• 14 years ago

I could imagine this would be worth it, on the guarantee that you get a personal, thoughtful reply. Not "ok" or "no".

denzil_correa• 14 years ago

Insanity prevails.

theklub2• 14 years ago

How about someone make a marketplace for this exact sort of thing? "Contact Y for $X now!"

michaelochurch2• 14 years ago

I think that's what he's trying to set up, because there's no way this is worth his time if he's actually being thoughtful about each message.

theklub2• 14 years ago

Ah, ic. Maybe this is a way of beta-testing a larger roll out?

andygcook• 14 years ago

Clarity.fm uses phone calls in a similar idea.

citricsquid2• 14 years ago

Someone has built that and posted it here a few weeks ago, I can't for the life of me remember the name though. To get around transaction laws they had "credits" though, so you couldn't cash out which sorta killed the idea for me. I'll try and find the post.

thedangler2• 14 years ago

transaction laws? You can't send someone money to talk to them?

freyfogle• 14 years ago

There was a start-up here in the UK working on this, can't remember the name. The model was a bit different as the money went to charity of the contactee's choosing. So they themselves didn't make money off of it, it was just a filter to weed out time wasters. The thinking was that this also made the busy important contactee more likely to take it seriously.

Not sure what happened with it though, this was several years ago

apexauk• 14 years ago

http://oneleap.to/ - social enterprise spin on the idea, you pay to charity to get your message through.

pioul• 14 years ago

This might be what you're talking about https://www.gramicon.com/pages/howto, it was posted on HN a while ago

andrewreds• 14 years ago

according to [1], Mark Zuckerberg makes $310.67 per second... so $100 will buy you under one third of a second of his time... I hope you are not expecting a long reply.

[1] http://www.best-reviewer.com/how-much-money-does-mark-zucker...

prezjordan• 14 years ago

Maybe when Facebook was still private and rising in value? I don't see where that income lies today. His salary is slightly over $1mm and $FBs value isn't shooting up anymore.

prostoalex• 14 years ago

His salary is less than "$2,147,483,647 a year" quoted on that page.

thedangler2• 14 years ago

This is why their stock is going to sore. :)

prawks3• 14 years ago

Keen Facebook observers will recognize this as a variant on the $1 pay-to-message plan that the social network has been experimenting with for months.

Welp, time to get all of my family's email addresses and close my FB account. Really the only thing I use it for at this point, and not valuable enough to pay any amount of money per message.

I don't like siding with Mashable on many issues, but I really hope FB isn't this hungry for new revenue streams.

EDIT: Welp, now I need to friend my family members to message them for free.

endianswap• 14 years ago

The plan is to charge users money to message folks outside of their friends list, not monetize two friends chatting.

jonknee• 14 years ago

At the moment. Previously this $100 per message scheme would also have seemed nuts. FB is under immense pressure to live up to its valuation, I expect these sorts of unsettling money grabs to continue for quite some time.

paulgb• 14 years ago

If I understand correctly, you only pay that much to go to the inbox if you aren't a friend with the person. Friends message friends for free.

It's actually pretty clever, I think. It's too high for unsolicited spam, but it's a trivial amount for the very rare instance of wanting someone you're not a friend of to read it.

prawks3• 14 years ago

Ah, thanks for the clarification. This makes sense, and I think was actually mentioned in the Mashable article. My mistake.

leephillips• 14 years ago

"now I need to friend my family members to message them for free"

If only there were some way to communicate using computers that did not require the services of a company like Facebook. Something using open protocols, where anyone could write servers and clients, that used the internet to communicate freely. I guess I'm just a dreamer.

pcote• 14 years ago

Slightly off topic but I'd easily value communicating with my peers at $100. I have the good fortune of working with smart people who, despite the importance of their own projects, are willing to help me if needed. The time of others has value and I think it should be used accordingly.

joeblau• 14 years ago

This is similar to the telco model where they charge texts and phone calls. Charging for communication is really the only way I see Facebook ever hitting its IPO valuation. This example is a bit extreme, but if they can figure out how to charge for the communication aspect, they may have a nice business.

joshfraser• 14 years ago

This reminds me a lot of the scheme that conference organizers set up. They might charge $5,000 for you to attend because that way you know you'll be with other high caliber people. They use money as the filter and just happen to profit as a result.

jpdoctor2• 14 years ago

> This reminds me a lot of the scheme that conference organizers set up. They might charge $5,000 for you to attend because that way you know you'll be with other high caliber people.

Spoiler alert: Those things are complete scams. The conference organizers pay for some big names to show up, and then fleece the people who have $$ but no power or access.

digitalzombie• 14 years ago

I'll pay him $100 to stop all these drama stories about Mark Zuckerberg.

It's seem like every now and then I hear stories about his sister, or how he dupe some guy for facebook, got duped in paying $1 billion for instagram, and now this.

Seriously, he's like a drama queen.

arbuge• 14 years ago

I plan to message him to complain about the price.

Facebook Charging $100 to Message Mark Zuckerberg

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