Facebook charges $1 per message sent to another user

Facebook is trying another way to monetize its huge social network with the introduction of the “small experiment” in Facebook Message. According to the Internet giant, the company will be charging $1 as a fee per message sent to a user not on your current network.

In the current setup, Facebook Message, which acts like a regular email account, allows all kinds of messages received from either your friends or strangers. But if users configured this setting, they have the capability to block messages sent by those that are not on their network of friends. But most users are not configuring this kind of privacy setting. Facebook Message, by default, allows messages from strangers and is being stored in the folder “other” where spam messages are also being stored.

With the $1 fee, strangers can send anyone’s Facebook Message inbox without the content being routed to the “other” folder. This will somehow prioritize the paid message to be sent directly to the user’s main inbox. 

With the introduction of this new feature, Facebook did not bother to release any statistics if there are indeed strangers who are using Facebook users’s unconfigured inboxes to spam contents. The thing is, no one knows yet if this initiative would be a possible success or if Facebook would just drop the price in the long run.

Facebook may have been the largest database in the Internet but the company is still in the experimental stage to tap its huge user base and convert them to money. Looks like we’re seeing a more money-making move from Facebook this 2013. What do you all think?

This post was first published at KabayanTech.