This chat room charges you a penny for every character you type

Entrepreneur Marc Köhlbrugge has launched Expensive Chat, a web-based chat service where each character entered costs a penny. As spotted by Motherboard, Köhlbrugge announced the site in a tweet, calling it "a social experience to see what happens in a chat room when it's not a free game, but every message is expensive, hard money". Directly in Köhlbrugge.

The site posts a ranking, with those who spent the most money up, and then the chat room itself. There are some friendly messages, but in a short time, Expensive Chat has become operational, it is usually littered with ads for businesses and services. If you want to write your own message to display, an area is at the bottom of the page. Expensive Chat supports band cards, debit cards and credit cards.

Users try to play on the site for more visibility. Some have chosen the way more and more so that their name appears at the top of the rankings. Others are simpler and give small remarks about their services followed by a URL. A person discovered a workaround to get his message across that costs only one penny:

Köhlbrugge describes the site as a social experience and could be examined through this lens (a response on Twitter note curtly, "The rich and the powerful can buy the word as always"). Public chat rooms can quickly become invasive and chaotic spaces. It is therefore interesting to see how people's decisions change when each letter is counted. Behavior commentary aside, says Köhlbrugge Motherboard the real reason he started was simpler. It seemed like a "fun way to make extra money".

Köhlbrugge thinks that it could now be further developed into a more concrete product where public figures could discuss and choose where to direct these funds. "For example, chat with kanye west, $ 10 per message, money goes to his charity," he says. Motherboard. And for all those who doubt that people would pay per character to send messages on any website, Köhlbrugge has pocketed about 150 USD in the space of a few days.