Service pays users (sort of) to read commercial e-mail

[Greg Broiles <gbroiles@netbox.com>]

>From time to time we've discussed the economics of paying per-message costs
for E-mail, and/or systems where advertisers pay users to read their
messages. Someone seems to have set up a system like that. It's at
<http://www.aristotle.org>. They seem to be using voter registration as an
is-a-real-person credential. (Their idea seems to be that they'll charge
commercial (paper) mailers less than it costs to print & mail junk mail,
deliver it (and some of the $) to users, and keep the remainder of the $
themselves. They seem to be sensitive about "reading things you're not
really interested in", which strikes me as amusing, given all of the crap
that people seem to mail me without special regard for whether or not it's
interesting. Advertisers seem happy enough to spend $.40 to mail me their
stuff, so what's the harm in spending $.30 where I get $.10 of it,
regardless of whether or not I ignore it as quickly as I do paper junk
mail? They're saving $.10, and I'm making $.10, and we're not wasting
paper. Who's being harmed? 

As I read their terms & conditions, they don't start paying you until Dec
1997, and you need to accumulate $100 worth of credit to get paid. Also, it
only seems to be interested in people from California at the moment.
(perhaps that's the only state they've got voter info on so far.) 

--
Greg Broiles                |  "We pretend to be their friends,
gbroiles@netbox.com         |   but they fuck with our heads."
http://www.io.com/~gbroiles |
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