My point is that the $1 message would only want to be seen by people who would make more from it than they value the time spent to read it, and companies would only want to send to people who they want to reach for the money, and could not reach for less - and the region between those two constraints is shrunk by the middleman's cut. I'd guess that mostly the only people who want to sit through $1 spam are on a boring conference call or unemployed, people who aren't good prospects. The better prospects would rather do an hour of consulting or work on a promotion.