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June 29, 2003
Paying For Ads
Yet another take on the spam problem: Matt Langeman pointed me to a 1998 Bill Gates article about opting to pay to read spam. Here's what Matt thinks about it:
I think it has the potential of working. If you could adjust the payment amount you should be able reduce the financial incentives of spamming. Maybe even each individual could set the amount that must be paid in order to send them an email. Of course micro payments would need to be easy and integrated into email clients etc.
Like Joel Spolsky's idea, this requires that all email move to a pay system, otherwise why would spammers ever use this when they can send you mail for free?
Does anyone remember All Advantage? It was a company that would pay you to look at ads online. This site seems to be all that's left of the "great new Internet company that pays its members to surf the Web". If a pay-for-ads system is to ever work, we would have to learn from the mistakes of All Advantage and its ilk.