Apparently AOL and Yahoo are going to be using Goodmail, a system that ‘certifies’ and gives preferential treatment to commercial e-mail for a fee. If you’re an e-mail marketer, you’ll either have to act right and get put on a whitelist or you’ll have to pay up. Since the spam problem seems to be getting better, e-mail’s gradually declining in importance, and AOL has the right to do whatever it wants with its e-mail service, it’s hard for me to get worked up about it. AOL’s subscribers will vote with their feet if it negatively impacts their experience.
However, Goodmail’s pay-for-play conversation did get me thinking – can someone provide an economic incentive for minimizing authorized e-mail? Most companies are reasonably good about contacting their members infrequently, but a few abuse the privilege, and the controls are rarely granular enough to allow me to specify exactly what I want and what I don’t – it’s either all-or-nothing.
How to persuade companies to reduce their outbound e-mail? I’d try copying the emissions market. (Greenhouse gases, social networking invitations – hmmm, I think the parallel here’s a good one.) The Chicago Climate Exchange has effectively reduced sulfur dioxide emissions over the last dozen years – perhaps a Commercial Communications Exchange could chop down the amount of unwanted e-mail. At a 30,000-foot level, here’s how it’d work – individuals would opt into a system that capped the amount of e-mail they could receive. Participating companies would be allocated a certain number of permissions – each time they send an e-mail they use up a permission. If they need to send more e-mails than they have permission to, they’ll have to buy more permissions on the open market – but if they reduce the amount of e-mail they send out to members, they can sell their permissions on that same market. And that’s it. A Commercial Communications Exchange would introduce a direct economic incentive to decrease the amount of commercial e-mail sent – since unused permissions can be sold – plus a hard cap on commercial e-mail volume. As a side effect, the market would determine the true value of an e-mail to an existing customer.
Cap-and-trade systems are fascinating.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi, Greg. You know, you might be interested in some of the work of Eric Horvitz at Microsoft Research. He’s been doing a lot of work trying to predict the cost of interruptions and the value of e-mails.
http://research.microsoft.com/~horvitz/
http://research.microsoft.com/~horvitz/busybody_cscw.htm
http://research.microsoft.com/~horvitz/attend.htm
Cool stuff.
This whole email thing is maddening.
As a former email software engineer from the early 90s on the leading product at the time I can tell you SPAM can be stopped but nobody is willing to do it because there’s money to be made anti-spamming.
Another example of trying to convert what’s free to a fee, it’s inevitable unless the masses of webmasters take back the internet of yesteryear, we still have the power whether you know it or not.