New service lets you contact anyone in the world, for a fee

Directly.me launches its services in Pakistan, along with the rest of the world.

ISLAMABAD:

Would you pay to contact someone on a social network who is currently outside your social circle? London-based startup Directly.me, which launched its services to customers around the world, including Pakistan, on July 5, thinks you would.

The service claims it allows its users to “directly contact any individual in the world.”

Directly.me achieves this ambitious goal by doing away with the social prerequisite of knowing a person before interacting with them. Instead, members who sign up for Directly.me are allowed to pay and access the information of other members.

Similarly, members can, in turn, earn money for letting people access their information. Users can set the amount they want to charge people for contacting them through messages, or they can use a “PayWhatULike” option.

The website also has a “Bounties” section, which aggregates the money offered by different people to contact the same person. It works like this: for example, consider that a person wants to pay Rs1,000 to contact Shahid Afridi, and another person is willing to pay Rs5,000. Now, if Afridi joins Directly.me and reads the messages from these two people, he can claim the Rs6,000 they collectively offered.



Directly.me claims its users will have access to information otherwise not available through search engines and blogs. Currently, Directly.me users are paying others for help with health issues, studying and travelling abroad, job referrals and career advice, says a press release issued by Directly.me.

In a sense, Directly.me’s services are similar to LinkedIn, with the difference being that LinkedIn charges its users a monthly or annual fee for premium services to contact anyone using its mail service.

The “pay-to-message” concept is also reminiscent of a Facebook trial of an optional service where users were charged a fee to send direct messages to people outside their networks.

“We have created a medium that provides our users with a much simpler way of connecting to anyone without any barriers,” Directly.me’s Regional Head of Marketing and Public Relations Uneeb Janjua said in a press release issued by the startup. “Exorbitant options such as, ‘Follow’, ‘Friend Request’ and ‘Circles’ have been removed to unlock avenues for one-to-one open communication,” he said.

After its private beta launch, Directly.me already has over 2.5 million direct connections. According to private estimates, over eight million Pakistanis use Facebook, around two million are on Twitter and there are nearly 1.5 million LinkedIn users in the country.

A 2012 survey of 800 Facebook users in Pakistan by B Solutions found that more than 53% of users lived in households with a monthly income of Rs70,000 or more, putting them among the top 10% of all Pakistani households by income.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 7^th, 2013.

Like Business on Facebook, follow @TribuneBiz on Twitter to stay informed and join in the conversation.