Wondering About All That Spam You’re Getting? Someone Is Getting Rich

Joel Cere wrote an enlightening blog post about some research that was done on those massive spam campaigns: The economics of Spam: 0.00000008% response rate = $3.5M turnover.

I’ll take the liberty of quoting Joel’s whole post here, since it’s a short one:

Academics at Berkeley used the “Storm botnet” network to blast 350 million emails for “male enhancement products” at a cost of about $80 per million emails sent. 28 sales resulted with an average purchase price of $100. They estimated that such campaigns when fully utilising the network could mean gross revenues of $7,000 to $9,500 a day, or $3.5 million a year for the spammers.

First read in The Register.
Full study here.

Processing the spam costs me time and money:

• My time going through messages in the spam folder looking for legitimate messages from people I don’t know;
• More memory and disk on my computer to process spam;
• The cost of the spam filtering software;
• Getting annoyed thinking about it.

I’ll invest in any company or product that can eliminate spam from the source.