I expect the intent was really the other way around. To someone who is truly interested in what you have to offer, a buck or two is just a rounding error on the salary they will eventually pay you. To someone who is harvesting contact information to fire spam your way, $2 * n-number-of-contacts starts to add up very quickly.
But that's the point. It's supposed to be a no brainer for someone who actually wants a real contact with the applicant but prohibitive for a spammer.
A recruiter who is genuinely interested in you for a job opportunity wouldn't mind paying the $2 but a spammer who is emailing hundreds or thousands of people just trying to build an interest list would suffer.
Still, this hinges on the person actually responding so the spammer wouldn't suffer in this case. They'd be happy to pay for a $2 lead and not suffer any expense if the person doesn't respond.
I think you'd have to pay regardless of the lead responding for this to have a chance of working. Again, that's how a successful system work with Elance. You pay regardless of getting your bid accepted.
I see your point. He really didn't ever get enough usage on the site to know if the refundable upfront fee would have been a sufficient anti-spam tactic or not. Several sites with the same basic idea all launched around that time. His was bootstrapped, at least one of the others had millions of VC behind it. I don't think any of them made it.
