EightBlack.

Oh crap.

I received this email from Perry Marshall tonite. Now the damn content of it is going to keep me awake for days. See what you think.

Simon,

Have you heard the rage, the shrieking and the cries of terror?
Have you signed the petition yet?
Be afraid.  Be very afraid.

Yup, Yahoo and AOL plan to start charging ? cent to 1 cent per email, to guarantee your messages get through the SPAM filters. The political activists are having a panic attack.

Gotta tell you, I had fun reading about this.  Hundreds of columnists emoting about the Very End Of Free Speech Itself. Apparently, today “free speech” not only means speaking your mind without going to jail, it also means having big corporations distribute your thoughts to millions of people for you, for free.

Friends and neighbors, if your “free speech” is riding on some big company’s generosity, you don’t have free speech.

You have sponsored content.

If you’re not willing to make any sacrifices to get your message out, why should anyone else do it for you?  This is a case study in mushy thinking from people who have no idea how expensive Free Speech really is.

I’m actually surprised Pay Per Email didn’t already kick in a year or two ago.  Basic economic fact: Email, being something that’s inordinately valuable - instantaneous access to someone’s inner sanctum - is something that shouldn’t be free.  The very fact that it is violates nature.

It is fundamentally impossible for email to remain totally free forever.  Something has to give.

Now if MoveOn.org wants to send 3 million emails a week, can they afford to pay $7,500 to $30,000 for the privilege?

That depends.  Certainly non-profits with huge email lists will be hit the hardest by this.  But before the Internet they would have had to pay half a buck to send a letter.   In my humble opinion, a quarter of a cent is quite a bit more attractive than half a buck.

Plus there’s a big upside to this that few people seem to have thought of.

If sending an email suddenly cost a fraction of a cent, most of the garbage in your customers’ email boxes would disappear overnight. Your ability to cut through the clutter would multiply dramatically.

Not only would your emails get through in the first place, they would have less competition.  Your customers would have more time to read them. It would double, triple or quadruple the response to your emails.

Would you be willing to pay for that?

You should.

Coming up: What’s really going to happen with pay per email and how it will effect your business…until then…

Perry Marshall

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 10th, 2008 at 1:25 am and is filed under Email Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.