>Dave, you said the only thing they have of value is a ton of personal info.
>Not so--by the time they are ready to launch they will have about ten
>million free service customers, of whom I suspect 40-50% will want to buy
>their products. Say five bucks a month times five million times 12 months
>per year. My.
>
>You don't have to sell info to a spammer if you own the products and the
>customers. As a marketer, I'd say this is a very, very good model.
Bill, actually you reaffirmed my point for me. The only thing Plaxo has is
personal contact information which according to your description, and the
info in that year old article on eWeek, they will be using to send their
own spam.
So the cost of the "free" service will be to get spammed by Plaxo to
purchase their other product lines? I don't know what their "other"
services will be (beyond the two they show on their site) but I have a hard
time imagining that any "free" service can convert 50% of it's users to
purchasing customers. I would imagine that converting even 5-10% would be
a stretch. The moment they start trying to sell to this "installed" base
of free users I imagine that they will find their servers black-listed on
many corporate mail systems they are not already black-listed on and once
they get black-listed on the public black-lists (SpamCop, Spamhaus, etc...)
many independent ISP's (like us and I understand the feelings of other
email admins that I correspond with on other listservs) will also be
blocking all of their mail too.
People are less tolerant of any spam. If Plaxo really starts to send out
their own unsolicited marketing emails for unsolicited products and
services to people that had been led to believe they they were signing up
for a free email contact list manager and had been assured by Plaxo that
they would not be spammed will probably lead to a revolt.
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