Spam Economics: Who's The Real Sucker?

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from the just-say-no? dept

For years I’ve been asking to hear the story of someone who actually bought from spam. Reporters have been doing a good job lately of tracking down the actual spammers and interviewing them – but I haven’t seen anything from the folks who actually believe the crap they get in the mail. Do they know that they’re suckers and are afraid to come out? A few others have noticed that, and have tried to start up a “just say no” sort of campaign – arguing that if we can convince everyone in the world to ignore spam, the spammers will go away. As this article points out, there’s a sucker born every day and no matter how bad you tell them spam is, someone, somewhere will always click and buy. Even if they know it’s bad, they’ll do it anyway. The article then goes on to discuss the “economics of spamming” showing how, even with a dreadfully low clickthrough rate (he refers to it as the Barnum Rate), the spammer still brings in a comfortable chunk of change. So, it only takes a few suckers to make spamming profitable – and we seem to have an endless supply of suckers.