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Comment by nicholassmith | Hacker News Reader

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.

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$1.00 per message is extremely expensive for individuals who make their money spamming inboxes.

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.

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.

Not when you exclude spam that never makes it to a users inbox.

The marginal cost of sending bulk spam is the opportunity cost of the botnet.

$1 a message is a one followed by the zeros you get from your cat playing with the zero key times more expensive than bulk spam.

That's far from accurage.

Let's use some vary pessimistic estimates.

183 billion spam messages a day * 1% make it to inbox / 10,000 people world wide making spam / 5$ per person per day = 36,600 messages dollar. Which need to be vary garbled to make it though the inbox so they tend to be instantly ignored by most people.

PS: I have seen more detailed estimates that suggest each read spam message costs .1c to 10c depending on how targeted the campaign is.

The thing is if $1 guarantees that it shows up in your inbox then peoples inbox space is going to go down in value. People will either stop using facebook messaging, learn to ignore the advert space or stop using facebook.

Not if they're also stealing credit card numbers.

Not for a campaign that probably spends $0.30-$0.50 on sending you a flyer that you never read.

It's extremely, extremely difficult to spam on Facebook. Have you tried? Even as a person, without any machine intervention. Soon every action you take becomes blocked by CAPTCHAs. Emails are no longer displayed as text, but as images of text. And I'm sure there are other features to prevent it I haven't stumbled upon.

Sure, but there's probably enough marks to have some people thinking about it if it gets rolled out.

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