On Tue, 13 Aug 2002 19:26:27 -0400, "Louis Davidson"
<louisd(_at_)davidsoncomp(_dot_)com> wrote:
[Somewhat off topic]
All (100%) of my clients delete spam with an expletive at the end of the
operation, do the people who pay for spam ads realize that they are wasting
their money?
Yup. But marketing is science, pure and simple. Given X number of
recipients, they can expect Y favorable responses. Success, from that
perspective, is merely an exercise of creating the largest possible pool
of recipients. The ad has a single fixed cost (the cost of development).
The variable cost for spam is in the area (plus or minus a zero or two)
of $.000001 per instance. It's nearly costless to the sender, and in
most cases, the ultimate beneficiary of the spam is only paying on a
results basis (percentage of sales, fee per transaction). So, there's no
cost to the beneficiary, and nearly no cost to the spammer. All the
spammer needs is one person from over 1,000,000 recipients to respond
favorably, and the spammer will likely show a positive return for the
effort. Do that all day long and you can make a few dollars.
It's a mistake to think that, just because *we* delete all of our spam,
everyone does. As Seth Godin pointed out, spam is whatever the recipient
thinks it is. There is someone out there for pretty much any type of
content. Clearly, there must be somebody out there who wakes up in the
morning, wanders over to his (statistically speaking, it's probably a
male, although it could be a female) computer, checks his inbox and,
upon seeing dozens of pr0n spams, exclaims in pure glee "Oh Boy! More
Pr0n!!!". There are people who want certain types of ads, or political
content, or self-help e-mails, or mortgage data, or health information,
or whatever. And there are people who don't.
(Note to Bob Braden: You're absolutely right - spam is unsolicited
e-mail that is not wanted, not just commercial. Mea Culpa. I was not
precise enough in my wording)
Ted Gavin * tedgavin(_at_)newsguy(_dot_)com *
Trustee & Officer, SpamCon Foundation <http://www.spamcon.org>
A California Non-Profit Organization
Protecting email as a medium of communications and commerce
Donations: <http://www.spamcon.org/donations>