Want to tell Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg how you really feel?
Get ready to shell out $100.
Facebook is testing a new feature that would let average Joes and Janes pay cash to get their messages into the inboxes of Facebook users they don’t know. (Pay nothing and your message ends up in the dreaded “other folder.”)
For most ordinary folks, Facebook charges $1 to send messages to people who are not in the sender’s social network. You are limited to sending only one of these kinds of messages a week.
Facebook announced it was testing this pay-to-message feature in December. Mashable was the first to discover that sending messages to Zuckerberg carry a hefty price tag. Facebook says it's testing some "extreme price points" to "filter spam" to popular people, celebrities and apparently the CEOs of giant social networks who have a ton of subscribers but a much more exclusive social circle. Still, $100 might not be too rich for that die-hard Justin Bieber fan.
"Where do I sign up?" joked Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter.
Facebook, which is under pressure from Wall Street to grow its business, is testing a lot of new ways to make money from its 1 billion plus users. As for charging $100 to message someone on Facebook, New York Times' Quentin Hardy quipped: “Wonder how much they'll charge you not to get it?”
My two cents? Not getting messages from random strangers on Facebook: priceless.
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