Facebook to Charge for Some Private Messages

The Wall Street Journal reports…

In a statement posted online, the Menlo Park, Calif.-based social site cited research showing that “imposing a financial cost on the sender may be the most effective way to discourage unwanted messages and facilitate delivery of messages that are relevant and useful.”

For now, it will cost $1 to send messages to the inbox of people outside your network and you can only receive one such message a week. But prices and limits may change, like everything else on the site. As the WSJ mentions, Facebook recently introduced a “service” that charges $7 to make your posts show more often on your friends’ news feeds – after changing how those news feeds work in the first place.

Last year Facebook said its site “is free and always will be.”