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.
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