At the intersection of "freeconomics" and targeting

Two pieces of news today struck me as connected. One, from the Adam Smith institute, on what Simon Waldman has called in the past "freeconomics", the trick of giving away as ad-supported something that used to bear a direct cost for the consumer. Think Metro and London Lite, or Loot, or Craigslist, or Skype, or the latest example via the ASI of Japanese vending machines that give away coffee in return for watching an ad.

The second comes from Metro, and is the launch of a dating website called Darwin Dating that is, not to put too fine a point on it, only open to beautiful people (no, I didn't even try).

Exclusive networking is not new - asmallworld already markets itself as the closed online community of choice (Mashable) for convicted felons A-list celebs Naomi Campbell and Paris Hilton and the jury's still out as to whether email for millionaires is a joke or not.

Where's the link? Targeting. Giving stuff away for free is often a brilliant strategy, and the Japanese vending machines will apparently be carefully located in desirable areas, but this is hardly as precise as simply targeting the ads exclusively to people whose time is worth your free coffee. (Poor people might walk a long way for a free cup of coffee. Rich people will probably want to hand over a few cents and skip the ad if its too long. There's a lot of potential for nuance here.) Peer-reviewed signals of success - and let's not try to kid ourselves, beauty is well correlated with success - are going to be increasingly important in an ad-funded, freeconomic system. For all its flippancy, and for all that insecure ugly people apparently loathe it, Darwin Dating (or something very like it) could easily find itself an important jigsaw piece in the reputation-management systems that substitute for cash as the signal of our ability to buy in a freeconomic world.