Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Facebook charges you $100 to post to people they term important

It has been incorrectly reported in the media that Facebook charges $100 to send a message to its founder, Mark Zuckerberg.  Apparently a more precise rendering would be that Facebook charges $100 to get a message to someone with some unspecified amount of traffic above some limit with whom you are not known as correspondents in order to reach their inbox.  Otherwise, your mail goes into their "other" box.

This has interesting implications for journalism.  In a world when Thomas Friedman gets speaking gigs for $50,000 a day, now a news source has to pay the reporter $100 just to submit a tip.