Actually, the one-to-one emails were only a small part of their business model. Earn has become popular among crypto companies for doing paid mass email campaigns.
If you are on the site as a user it's obvious. You get a lot of paid messages if you sign up for the right lists. Not sure if it will scale, but interesting use of crypto.
This is kind of a silly site, but it's one of the few articles I can find on the topic. https://sludgefeed.com/earn-com-becoming-go-to-crypto-advert...
You're completely right, but what a waste.
Instead of solving the spam problem and giving marketing/sales/recruiting people better tools, they just incentivized people to sign-up for mailing lists that they probably didn't care about.
By coinbase now owning these lists, there have got to be some privacy concerns...
Re:Coinbase acquires Earn.com
by lallysingh on Monday April 16, 2018 @04:42PM
(#16852576)
I don't know why they just didn't go into email-based cryptocurrency payments. If they can really change currencies easily using it, it seems the simplest and highest-impact business they can do.
Yeah disappointing but not the attempt at using tokens / blockchain to eliminate spam. We're going to be experimenting with a few spam elimination models at Sendy: https://www.sendy.network/
Re:Coinbase acquires Earn.com
by arisAlexis on Monday April 16, 2018 @02:01PM
(#16851196)
Check out veropost.com too :)
Re:Coinbase acquires Earn.com
by thelegendxp on Tuesday April 17, 2018 @06:55PM
(#16863025)
the email confirmation for signup is broken on that website
Re:Coinbase acquires Earn.com
by arisAlexis on Wednesday April 18, 2018 @09:01AM
(#16867003)
oh thanks I will fix it asap
One thing that 21.co never really figured out was a killer use case, or how to best connect buyers with highly-targeted sellers in this "attention" marketplace. It just seemed like a cool way for startup CEOs to get better quality emails and direct the money to the charity of their choice.
[1] https://www.fizbuz.com