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Netropolitan Is a Facebook For the Affluent, and It's Only $9000 To Join
MojoKid writes Facebook has become too crowded and too mundane. With around 1.3 billion Facebook users, it's understandable to be overwhelmed by everything and want to get away from it all. However, unlike Facebook which is looking to connect everyone to the internet, there is a new site called Netropolitan that focuses more on exclusivity and privacy. The site was founded by composer and former conductor of the Minnesota Philharmonic Orchestra James Touchi-Peters who wanted to provide a social media site for affluent and accomplished individuals. People wishing to join need only pay a mere $9,000 to join. Of that amount, $6,000 is the initiation fee and the remaining $3,000 is for the annual membership fee which users will continue to pay. So what does the initiation and annual fee get you? For starters, Netropolitan will offer an ad-free experience and will not promote any kind of paid promotions to its members. However, it will allow the creation of groups by businesses in which members can advertise to each other under certain guidelines.
$6,000 to join $3,000 pa and they only have a .info domain? Nothing says "exclusive" and "accomplished" like a .info domain...
It's rich people. Let's just put that down in here in black and white. A nine-thousand-dollar entry fee doesn't test for your contributions to medicine or the arts, or whether you've taken your hard-earned wealth and invested it in a nice brownstone filled to the brim with the best contemporary art has to offer. That $9000 bouncer will be just as happy to let in every reality TV star, pop artist, flash-in-the-pan record producer, and fleetingly-wealthy action movie screenwriter.
And if you think that a $9000 fee is going to stop somebody from registering just so they can grab all your "private" communications and put them up on the public web, you have seriously underestimated human puckishness.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
So that we can laugh at the balls it takes to come up with this kind of thing. "Damn, why didn't I think of that?"
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
If this does amount to anything, tabloids and paparazzi will find the fees to be a trivial investment. Just one lead will easily pay for itself.
The grounds crew is usually made up of 2-3 well paid full-timers who manage the entire grounds operation along with another half-dozen full-timers who are better (but not well) paid people who do stuff like maintain a fleet of equipment, oversee the massive irrigation systems, the extensive chemicals used to keep the grass up and then oversee the dozen or so seasonal low-wage hourly employees who do the grunt work.
There's a lot of irony in the club business. I've heard a lot of stories -- pictures kept screwed down so the members won't steal them, floral arrangements strategically timed so that the bridge ladies don't take them home hours after they get put out, members blackballed for getting caught loading their trunk with snack items like bottled soda/beer/chips and the never ending calls from members nitpicking their monthly bills over things like "I didn't have desert that night" or "we only ordered one drink". Not to mention the few whose accounts get sent to *collections* over unpaid dues/bills.
While they are really wealthy people there (I've seen new members come in and just write checks from a blue vinyl checkbook for $80-100k initiation fees), I think there's an awful lot of "keeping up appearances" that goes on -- people whose money ran out yet try to maintain an illusion of wealth, or climbers with short-term leases on Mercedes, rented luxury houses and the hope that they can snag some money from the truly wealthy for whatever shell game they're running.
Frankly speaking, I'm mostly surprised that this doesn't already exist.
It does. There's a Craiglist-type feature on Bloomberg trading info terminals. Yachts, rentals in the Hamptons, that sort of thing. You can message other people via the Bloomberg system if you see something you like.
There's a paid social network for rich conservatives. This is independent, not a Bloomberg thing. It's only $5/month, which is apparently enough to keep the noise level down.
There's a persistent rumor that there are special news sources for rich people. There are, but they're very narrow. There are lots of newsletters you can buy for $50 to $1000 a month that provide detailed coverage of obscure business subjects. If you really need to know what's going on with bulk carrier leasing, oil drilling equipment activity, or wafer fab capacity shortages, there's a newsletter for that. Offshore Alert, which covers offshore scams, is one of the more readable ones, and you can see the first few lines of each story for free. There are expensive newsletters devoted to security and terrorism, which give the illusion of inside information, but they tend to be marketing tools aimed at rich paranoids.
If you want to know what's going on in the world, read The Economist. After you've been reading it for a year, you'll have a good understanding of how the world works.