Is spam a matter of supply and demand?

Written on August 20, 2008 – 11:11 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

29 percent of Internet users have purchased something they were pointed to via spam, according to a study by Marshal. Not surprisingly, the most commonly purchased items include Viagra and porn, but also software, and luxury items such as watches, jewelery and clothing - the counterfeit type.

622 visitors of the Marshal site took a poll, which asked ‘What purchases have you made from spam?’. Quite a tendentious question if you’d ask me. ‘Have you made purchases from spam?’, would have been a more balanced question.

Anyway, a similar poll from Forrester Research from 2004 showed that out of 6,000 respondents, 20 percent had made purchases from spam. So the problem is getting worse. A reason for this could be that Internet users have gotten more used to making online purchases. Or that spam has become more sophisticated (in a negative way), like blog spam.

If taken seriously, this study shows that spam is a matter of supply and demand. “The poll highlights an inconvenient truth,” said Marshal’s Vice-President of Products, Bradley Anstis. “Many of us often question ourselves, why is there so much spam? The answer is, enough people are purchasing products from spam to make it a worthwhile and profitable endeavor for spammers.”

Marshal’s Website poll indicates that the number of respondents who admitted to making a purchase through spam have made multiple purchases; on average, more than two different types of purchase per person. This supports the conclusion that those who buy from spam make a habit of it. My guess is that people buy stuff via spam which they wouldn’t dare to buy in public.

So spam turns out to be a rather booming business. No wonder the number of spam emails already make up for 85 percent of all email traffic. Anstis: “There are approximately 250 million people out there who are interested in these kinds of products and have made purchases from spam in the past. That’s equivalent to double the population of Japan mixed in with every other Internet user. As a spammer - how do you reach that market without knowing specifically who these people are and with the bare minimum of expense? Easy, send lots of emails to everyone.”

I hope you like that post!

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Bradley Anstis, business, E-mail spam, email, Forrester Research, spam, Spam in blogs, study, World Wide Web

About the author: Ernst-Jan is blogger and co-organizer of BLOG08, who previously worked in New York to cover news at the United Nations. Next to writing, he's also a singer in the band Christina Five. Follow him on Twitter or read his personal blog Dutchproblogger.com .

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4 comments/trackbacks to “Is spam a matter of supply and demand?”

Aug 20, 2008: More consumer first talk. « Tom Altman’s Wedia Conversation
[...] Is spam a matter of supply and demand? [...]
Aug 21, 2008: Let a thousand spam messages blossom
[...] isn’t good for anything (which would be true enough if it weren’t for the fact that so many people actually respond to it), so they decided that they could take something bad and make it into something good. That [...]

By Dan Field on Aug 20, 2008

Interesting blog. We too have seen a massive increase in spam emails being sent out.

Our recent quarterly review of spam has shown a massive 4x increase in the amount of spam being sent out since the start of the year (See: http://www.clearmymail.com/SpamIndex ).

The types of spam are getting more dangerous with a big increase in the number of Phishing emails being sent out, with the aim of defrauding people.

To “fund” this massive increase the spammers are also sending out more virus emails, infecting PC’s around the world which can then be used as “Bot-net” to send out more spam!

Recent virus emails include one titled “Journalists shot in Georgia”, playing on the recent troubles between Russia and Georgia (More at: http://www.clearmymail.com/pre.....email.aspx)

So yes, the amount of spam is increasing faster than ever… and its getting more dangerous too, but at the end of the day if people didn’t buy from spam - it wouldn’t exist!

[Reply]
By Bob Boynton on Aug 20, 2008

When politicians raised campaign funds and had to go through the U.S. mails the cost of raising a dollar was ninety-five cents. For each dollar raised the politician got five cents to spend on the campaign.

Health insurance, life insurance, etc. more that half the money collected goes into the cost of selling the insurance.

Why do we have spam. One answer is the one given here in this post. Another is the cost of spam is incredibly small. The return is surely better than on either of my two examples because the cost of email, etc. is so low.

The cost has been transferred to me. I have to sift through it and hit the delete button. Since my time is not free I am paying a considerable cost so that spammers can make their fortunes.

How could we raise the cost? What if every email that I rejected cost whoever had sent it? Surely there are programmers smart enough to figure out how to do that.

[Reply]

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