Boxbe, a company in San Francisco, is a bit like AGLOCO. It is paying you to accept marketing online.
It sounds pretty useless.
The Mercury News has a summary piece here. Here’s how it works: You create an-email account at Boxbe, provide some basic information about yourself, and then you set a price marketers have to pay to contact you. The marketers earn the right, thereby, to have their email go to your other, regular email account. Boxbe takes a 25 percent cut. Thede Loder, Boxbe’s co-founder suggests you set the price somewhere between 15 and 25 cents per email. The idea is, if they have to pay you, marketers will stop spamming. But we don’t understand: Won’t they keep spamming your regular box anyway?
7 Comments
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john said:
So, if I price it at 100$ per email, does that mean I never get any spam? Sounds too good to be true.
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Ron Mexico said:
This is a HORRIBLE idea, which if funded by venture capitalists, will show just how far the froth of “Web 2.0″ has risen. I’m not familiar with how e-mail becomes tagged as “spam” or regular mail, but I have to imagine there is a way to re-route marketing e-mails into regular inboxes which doesn’t involve paying a fee to a third party.
Also, I just don’t understand the business model here. Where is the growth potential? At the high end of 25 cents an e-mail, Boxbe would have to re-route more than 16 million e-mails just to reach $1 million a year in revenue. Also, if the goal is to reduce spam, doesn’t this somewhat confine the growth potential of the business?
This is a complete fraud if you ask me. I’m glad that some venture capitalists such as John Doerr and Vinod Khosla are finally seeing the light and investing in businesses that can actually help the world, as well as garbage like this designed to make a quick buck.
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JOSEPH P. MARINO said:
This idea will never fly, whoever created this obviously don’t know how much money the big spam houses rake in daily.
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AJ said:
This is another feeble attempt at attacking the wrong problem. Spammers are going to get to your regular InBox, no matter what.
So if I really want to view and/or receive marketing email I would rather go to a site like Whatsbuzzing.com where I can browse and search across hundreds of stores and keep my InBox clutter free. (Yes, I am an interested party)
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Anonymous said:
If you looked a little at the way it works, you might not be so quick to dismiss it. That isn’t to say that there aren’t difficulties with the model, but it’s not something that’s a sure miss.
Email going through a Boxbe address must either face a captcha (I believe) or use a plugin to pay for inbox deliveries/opens. Individuals will solve the captcha and get delivered for free, marketers will set a pay threshold and install the plugin, and spammers can’t do either since the price would be set too high for unwanted email.
If you don’t disclose your non-Boxbe address, then spam has to come through one of those two mechanisms. You set the price low or zero for people you want email from, and high for unknowns to prevent spam.
I’m not connected to Boxbe, other than that it’s interesting from the email marketer’s standpoint.
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David Maxwell said:
I see everyone criticizing Internet startups, and we should all accumulate due diligence, but I tend to give the startups a chance and often deride their detractors.
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abby said:
Geez, another get rich quick scheme by a bunch of tweens working out of their garage…froth and Web 2.0 is right…these guys should devote their time to something useful, like joining the army
