On 5/26/03 at 7:02 AM Shannon Jacobs wrote:
If you know of an anti-spam email system that will block any advertising
UNLESS the advertisers pay MY price for MY time, then please tell me
about
it. I'll sign up and consider my spam problem solved.
That appeared in the ASRG a few days ago, and though the economic aspects
have been receiving more serious consideration recently, that particular
comment didn't get much consideration, but the more I think about it, the
more it "strikes a chord" in my thinking. I hope that most of us are
willing
to agree that advertising is a legitimate business activity. The
advertisers
are going to look for any channel that will effectively reach potential
customers, but there is a problematic tradeoff involved here. Some points
for consideration:
1) We want to be informed of the best values.
2) We don't want to give up our privacy.
3) Companies compete to create the best values.
4) Email could help customers find the best values.
Number 4) seems to be a theoretical point, but right now you have to admit
that broadcast advertising is a very inefficient advertising mechanism. At
any given time, I'm really only interested in purchasing a few things, and
right now finding the best value is a very tedious process. It is quite
possible that I will see a broadcast ad for just what I want at the best
price available. Yet given the essentially random nature of a broadcast
ad,
how would I know that was the one? Actually, I'd kind of like to receive
specific and detailed email from each of the companies with good
candidates,
explaining exactly why their product and their price was the best match
for
my real needs.
I have to suggest the best medium for that is the web, not email. With the
web, advertisers can have a secure payment system in place (Although most
payment systems are designed in reverse with browsers paying websites, it
wouldn't be hard for them to operate backwards.), make sure someone
actually
viewed the ad instead of software auto-deleting it (Or at least, be _more_
sure of it, with Turing tests and quizzes about the ads.), and offer lists
of
the ads and how much they are willing to pay, instead of sending out ads
that
are deleted because the recipient isn't willing to view an ad for that
amount.
In short, this entire 'pay people to look at ads' works a lot better over
the
web than over email, and it already works over the web with no protocol
changes, and it's not worth trying to figure out how to make it work over
email. Pull is the correct model for that, not push.
And it's not worth worrying any such hypothetical system about when
researching
spam, because the whole idea isn't very useful.
This doesn't stop such hypothetical ad companies from setting up a
mailing list for their own customers to alert them of new ads. Using all
the
various precautions and standards for operating a mailing list, of course.
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