In an effort to find more sources of revenue, Facebook is reportedly charging users to send a message to CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Mashable discovered Thursday that if users want to send a message to Zuckerberg, Facebook will offer the opportunity to keep the message out of his “Other” folder for $100 .
The “Other” folder is where the social network sends message it assumes the user doesn’t want or need to read right away. These usually includes messages from group or events.
In Mashable ‘s tests, they found that the users who received the $100 option were those who weren’t one of Zuckerberg’s 16 million followers. They noted that that may have been a coincidence.
As we have previously reported, Facebook was also testing a $1 fee to send a message to people outside of a user’s network. The social network was testing the feature with a small number of users and provided the same opportunity to keep the message out of the other party’s “Other” folder.
However, if the recipient moved the message to the “Other” or “Spam” folder, the sender would not be able to contact them again.
Many users were unaware of the existence of the “Other” folder, until an incident last summer in which a bug in mobile devices synced a user’s facebook.com email address so that messages from a user’s friends went to the Facebook inbox, while messages from anyone else went to the “Other” folder.
A Facebook spokesperson said about the pay-to-message features, “We are testing some extreme price points to see what works to filter spam.”
Would you pay $100 to send a message to Mark Zuckerberg, or $1 to message another user?
