Explaining The Business of Spam 74
ATMAvatar writes "The IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy hosted in Oakland nearly three weeks ago featured a study on the economics of spam. It attempts to identify and analyze the chain of businesses behind spam and the products that are featured. The goal was to take a more comprehensive look at the mechanics behind the industry in an attempt to identify better, alternative means to combat spam."
Fine the parent company (Score:1, Funny)
of each business 5 dollars per piece of SPAM. Real businesses will distance themselves almost instantly.
The root of the problem (Score:3, Funny)
We need to find a way of dealing with the root causes of the problem; filtering and the like is like sweeping up rat droppings, what you really need is to get rid of the rats. Perhaps if we could find a way of really making this business unprofitable.
The article (Score:2, Funny)
http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/%7Esavage/papers/Oakland11.pdf
Re:Low costs... (Score:4, Funny)
Well, from what I've heard from people in such unsavory businesses, the profit is down. That's in conversions (convert from unknown person to paying customer) per thousand emails.
Years ago, you could get a conversion ratio of 1:300 to 1:1,000. A few years ago, the conversion rate went to something like 1:100,000 to 1:1,000,000, depending on how "clean" your list is.
The little guys trying to push their pharmaceuticals, porn sites, or whatever do very poorly, so it could only be one of every few million make a paying customer. The good money moved over to mainstream companies. Their "targeted marketing" (i.e., spam that they'll insist you asked for) from mainstream companies has a better look and feel, *and* makes it through most spam filters.
You are correct. Faster machines with more memory, and larger residential pipes make a *huge* difference. I knew someone who could send out 100,000 messages/hr on a 28.8 dialup on a machine with 128MB RAM. What's your 15MB/s up FiOS line and a machine with 4GB RAM going to do? A whole lot more, if you set it up right. So they aren't hurt as much by the poor conversion rates, they just make up for it by spamming more people.
As long as people buy from spam or "targeted marketing", the companies will continue to send it. When the sales aren't there, spam will go the way of the print department store catalogs.
apropos Mencken quote (Score:3, Funny)
âoeNo one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.â
Henry Louis Mencken
bitcoin spam!? (Score:1, Funny)
New type of spam (Score:1, Funny)