Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Website connects experts with people who pay for answers
Earn.com lets you make money giving out your email address. You decide how much it’s worth. If you’re a big shot, or you think you are, you could charge $100 per message.
That’s what Ben Horowitz does. As of last January, he’d made over $8,000, which he donated to the charity Black Girls Code. He’s one half of the consulting firm Andreessen Horowitz. Marc Andreessen co-founded Netscape, co-wrote the pioneering Web browser Mosaic, and is otherwise a general hotshot. We’re not sure what Horowitz does. (Just kidding. Horowitz sold a software company to Hewlett-Packard Co. for $1.6 billion and was a major investor in Skype before it was sold to Microsoft. He consults.)
After signing up at Earn. com, we wondered whether this would be a good way for would-be authors to find publishers without going through an agent. We typed in “Penguin Group” and got an associate editor at Penguin Random House. We contacted him for $1, though he has yet to reply. The contract gives him seven days, then it’s kaput. We only have to pay if he responds. He’s looking for interesting people to write books about business challenges.
The site makes suggestions on whom to contact, such as Deloitte Corp. or Google. So we contacted Sean Melis, a consultant in Deloitte’s Australian office, for $1. He lists himself as knowledgeable about artificial intelligence and the so-called blockchain undergirding the bitcoin cryptocurrency. We asked him about that. We’re the first to pay him to answer a question, but he sounds smart. He said the most exciting thing about the blockchain is “the decentralized future it paints.”
Earn.com is all done in bitcoin, which can be translated back and forth with dol-