Okay, as Robin says, I can see that as a serious loss leader, but you are right that it doesn’t make sense as a general business strategy. You’d have to be paying locals to fake it, which would up the cost by around an order of magnitude (unless you could pay piece rate) and make the coordination much harder, plus face to face contact adds risks.

On the other hand, one date would probably make it possible to string the sucker out for an extra month, just on the hope they’d get a second hit. Maybe if you charged $100/month for the service you could break even at $10/hour?

I think the sucker in the OP is definitely right to sue. We haven’t had any independent enforcement of false advertising laws in the US in a long time.

Plausible – if he had a very high traffic blog or something. Viral marketing, dontcha know.

Dammit! It doesn’t matter if it’s expensive beer—it hurts the sinuses!

Yeah but this guy claimed the Match employee actually went out on a date with him.

In trying to frame his reply, his facial muscles began to pull so hard in opposing directions that I began to worry for him, and finally said, “Forget it.” I’d been planning to wonkishly engage him, mind-to-mind, on the question of whether “monetize” wouldn’t more properly be construed as “turn into a form of currency, for purposes of trade.” Then I realized he didn’t know his own mind, and was afraid I’d also get lost in his if I ventured in.

In retrospect, that latter sense of “monetize” might be closer to the mark, since we’ve seen a lot of “monetization” attempts fall flat with users. Companies trade your online identity info around, acquired in hopes it’ll be worth more someday. And maybe we’ve had derivatives—and derivatives of derivatives—for those currencies for a while now. Note that a lot of dot-com M&A activity was of the stock-swap variety. Yahoo’s stock-only purchase of eGroups, for example —they were buying access to users, as the coin of some ghostly realm. At more reasonable valuations of Yahoo stock, eGroup’s price wasn’t as gobsmackingly exorbitant as it seemed at the time.

Similar behavior about users and “eyeballs” persists even recently. It’s not quite right to say, for example, that Google bought YouTube for a billion dollars or whatever the quoted figure was. Google handed over Google stock (or options on such stock) to YouTube. Look at Google stock today. Do we say now that Google bought YouTube for half a billion dollars, not a billion, because of that drop in valuation while most of the options were still not fully vested? What if Google stock halves again? No, this is all more like swings in the values of currencies against each other.

Maybe in the future, instead of 15 minutes of fame each, we’ll all have 15 individual dollar bills (but no more, you don’t want hyperinflation) each with a picture of ourselves, to issue to the Internet Ghost Economy. All of us, that is, except for the anarchists, the gold-bug libertarians, and the privacy mavens, who will wear t-shirts saying “monetize this!” (The privacy mavens will be wearing hoods as well, so that no counterfeiters can snap their pictures and issue dollars with their images.)

It seems like you could pay someone $1/hour in India or China to maintain less than once a day email contact with probably 10 people an hour, so 80 people/8 hour day, repeating contact every two days = 160 people at a $20/month = $3200 inflow for $8/day * 30 days = $2400 outflow, for a monthly profit of 33%.

There’s a lot of slop in that rough guess, but it certainly looks like it could be profitable.

I can’t imagine how it would be a cost-effective business model.

http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2007/08/30/yahoo-class-action-lawsuit-settled/