Facebook's message charge shows how to make money out of desperate fans

One of Facebook's strangest revenue-building schemes of recent times is its new decision to charge civilians to send messages to celebrities. Messaging Tom Daley, for instance, will cost nearly £11. Miranda Hart, meanwhile, is 71p.

Facebook's aim, it selflessly claims, is to reduce the amount of spam in celebrities' mailboxes, but in tacitly purporting to provide a direct route to Jessie J's eyeballs, it disregards the reality of social media for even the remotely famous. A celebrity's experience of social media is completely different from our own, bombarded as they are with praise, fury, demands and inanity with each hour that passes.

 Also, many of the miniature missives pinged at notable names come from desperate fans who are so obsessed that £11 will seem like a small price to pay.

Instant access on Facebook might make it easier for Katie Price to respond to such messages before the only useful tip is which buggy to choose, but to any celebrity with a conscience, the day-to-day truth of fanmail can be frustrating and traumatic. They start with the best intentions, hoping to reply to everybody, to solve every problem. But faced with three postbags, it's just not possible.

So how do you ignore someone asking for help?Celebrities and musicians will often talk – off the record – about the turmoil they feel when faced with endless requests from charities, desperate fans, or parents with seriously ill kids. Responding to and fulfilling these requests would be an all-consuming job. And for time-rich celebrities of the reality TV world, this might actually be the answer. It takes 10 seconds to open a message seeking help or charity, assess its content and respond with either "thanks babes", "sorry babes" or "see a doctor babes", then hit send.

So it would be possible to reply to 360 messages per hour. If we take £11 per message as an example, and if Facebook take a 30% cut similar to Apple's App Store commission, that could be £2,520 per day to a celebrity for just an hour's work. That's almost £1m annually. And if we can assume anything of the TOWIE brigade, it's that they would quite possibly view altruism a lot more favourably if it resulted in a huge pile of cash.

The only sticking point is that, so far, Facebook is offering precisely 0% of revenue to a message's recipient, leaving no incentive for a single message to be read. If you'd like to message Mark Zuckerberg to ask why, go right ahead. It will cost you $100.