I wonder if a per-message fee for a certain kind of message would be a good business model for this. My suspicion is that it would work very well if all your users had that reluctance to ever spend anything online (people are much more willing to buy utilions that involve getting a physical product than to pay for things like apps)), but it breaks down as soon as someone with some unused disposable income realizes that spamming $1 notes isn’t that expensive.
Only being able to send a certain number of messages per week of a special type might be enough for indicating non-spam, as long as you could solve the problem of people making multiple profiles to get around it. Having a small fee attached to the service might help with tracking that down, since it would keep people from abusing it too extremely, and cover the cost of having someone investigate suspicious accounts (if more than one is paid for by the same credit card at around the same time, for example).
OKcupid solves the multiple account problem for us. It is probably better to not send a virtual rose than to make an account that you then have to answer all the questions to.
I wonder if a per-message fee for a certain kind of message would be a good business model for this. My suspicion is that it would work very well if all your users had that reluctance to ever spend anything online (people are much more willing to buy utilions that involve getting a physical product than to pay for things like apps)), but it breaks down as soon as someone with some unused disposable income realizes that spamming $1 notes isn’t that expensive.
Only being able to send a certain number of messages per week of a special type might be enough for indicating non-spam, as long as you could solve the problem of people making multiple profiles to get around it. Having a small fee attached to the service might help with tracking that down, since it would keep people from abusing it too extremely, and cover the cost of having someone investigate suspicious accounts (if more than one is paid for by the same credit card at around the same time, for example).
OKcupid solves the multiple account problem for us. It is probably better to not send a virtual rose than to make an account that you then have to answer all the questions to.