One sale for every 12.500.000 Spam messages sent…

Written on 10th November 2008                                                                                                              2 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur

Computer scientists from University of California, Berkeley and UC, San Diego (UCSD) have been spamming us. They admit it too. In an effort to get a better understanding of the deeper workings of SPAM they infiltrated a network of SPAMMERS and sent out almost 350 million e-mail messages within 26 days. To find out how effective SPAM actually is they set up a fake pharmacy campaign but showed an error message when people actually submitted their credit card details. They found out that only 28 people actually bought something which means they got a 0.00001% response rate.

“Taken together, these conversions would have resulted in revenues of $2,731.88—a bit over $100 a day for the measurement period,” said the researchers. The network of hacked computers they used to send spam controlled millions of PCs and sent out a lot more messages which the researchers estimate to generate about $7,000 a day or $3.5m a year. Not bad but not huge either. As the researchers concluded: “The profit margin for spam may be meager enough that spammers must be sensitive to the details of how their campaigns are run and are economically susceptible to new defenses.”

As it becomes harder to hack PCs and people are less eager to click on spam maybe one day sending SPAM will just become uneconomic. I sure hope so…