There's a sucker born every minute.
June 20, 2001 5:11 PM   Subscribe

There's a sucker born every minute. Some guy raises over $3,000 by letting people post messages on his site called sendmeadollar.com. Is this a new model for ecommerce? [via memepool]
posted by timothompson (17 comments total)
 
It's just a wacky idea that you probably wish you had thought of first.

I do beleive this was a genuine Homer Simpson scheme a few years back, although he used an automatic phone dialer that cycled through the phone book, and claimed that if you sent a dollar to "Happy Dude", you'd be happy.
posted by tomorama at 5:32 PM on June 20, 2001


Boy, I haven't seen that page in a long time. Last time I went there, there were only about 10 dollars/messages submitted. Impressive.
posted by waxpancake at 5:41 PM on June 20, 2001


The Boxster guy sent in a dollar.
posted by modofo at 5:49 PM on June 20, 2001


That's the first time I've seen people pay a buck to spam...
posted by slackbash at 7:43 PM on June 20, 2001


He should go to jail for that.
posted by raysmj at 7:46 PM on June 20, 2001


That settles it, from now on, new posts to MetaFilter will be a dollar.
posted by mathowie at 7:47 PM on June 20, 2001


"I'll buy that for a dollar!"

The movies really do predict the future.
posted by john at 8:23 PM on June 20, 2001


I read it as Sean Meade dollar dot com. Whoa.
posted by norm at 8:38 PM on June 20, 2001


If the whole point of sending in a dollar is to post a spam in the guestbook, then it looks like he made closer to $217.00.

Erm, I mean, 217 people agreed to the honor system that says they *will* send in a dollar. But if that worked, *MAKE*MONEY*FAST* would work, and we'd all be as rich as Dave Rhodes.
posted by swell at 9:25 PM on June 20, 2001


Or better yet, charge money for a front-page, gloriously blatant self-post on MetaFilter.

I wonder how much money people are willing to spend for the hits.

I'd be more than willing to play the Momus of the weblogs and immortalize people in my blog for money.

Well, probably not.
posted by mgtrott at 9:37 PM on June 20, 2001


dude. i could totally pay off my credit cards by doing this...
posted by sugarfish at 9:57 PM on June 20, 2001


Send me a dollar and I'll go away? No I take that back cuz y'all might actually do it!
posted by ZachsMind at 9:57 PM on June 20, 2001


Or better yet, charge money for a front-page, gloriously blatant self-post on MetaFilter.

In color! With BLINK and MARQUEE tags! Man's gotta make a buck somehow. :-)

Matt could also start auctioning off all the long-since-dormant super-low user IDs. Be interesting to see what the market value would be on something like that, if nothing else....
posted by youhas at 10:33 PM on June 20, 2001


And then donate all of the proceedings to Zach... heh
posted by fooljay at 10:50 PM on June 20, 2001


raysmj: He should go to jail for that.

Why? No deception, no "bait-n-switch", no coercion. Or...are you just kidding?
posted by davidmsc at 11:48 PM on June 20, 2001


Actually I think Matt could make money by selling vanity domain names. Imagine!
fooljay.metafilter.com, waxy.metafilter.com, davidmsc.metafilter.com, ..uhm.. albuquirky.metafilter.com...

That's gotta be worth at least a buck to some of you. I wanna reserve zach.metafilter.com!
posted by ZachsMind at 1:26 AM on June 21, 2001


Actually, I did think of it first and got the domains givemeadime.com, givemeapenny.com, and givemeaquarter.com. Then the idea dropped off the radar, then PayPal started to look a little twitchy as a conduit.

I had this plan to set up a social experiment that I would have two choices: donate cash to me or to a charity of my choice and if my donations ever crossed $10K (arbitrary), everything else would go to charity.
posted by plinth at 5:15 AM on June 21, 2001


« Older Music CDs sales are down, coinciding with...   |   Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments