The short answer to this one is easy: money. Even if only a small percentage of people who receive a spam email respond, that is thousands of hits for very little money. It is estimated that the average spam message is sent to over 1 million addresses. If only 2 percent of these respond, that is over 20,000 people answering and possibly purchasing whatever the spammer has to offer. Despite the annoying nature of this kind of advertising, it is effective. People buy the products, so spammers continue to market with these blanket emails.
Not only can you get a large number of responses for very little effort, spamming is a cheap way to advertise. Spammers set up hundreds of servers generating millions of spam emails every minute. It is easy and much cheaper to hire a spammer to get your product out to the marketplace than it is to buy advertising space in a more legitimate market. Google the word “spam” and you will find ads for CDs and email mailing lists put together by companies for the do-it-yourself spammer. For as little as $99, a company can buy a mailing list of 500,000 valid emails. Many of these companies insist that these lists are “spam-free”. This simply means that these emails were gathered by ‘opting in’ by the consumer when they buy a product or service. The company then sells these addresses to people who generate spam lists.
There is very little regulation on spam, meaning that it is still the wild west of advertising. There has been “do not email” list legislation proposed to great opposition by both spammers and legitimate marketing companies. According to a Washington Times article in April, 2004, the Direct Marketing Association claimed that anti-spam legislation would cost the U.S. economy $12.5 billion every year. They say that while legitimate marketers would follow rules and regulations governing spam, the most annoying spammers wouldn’t. There are also concerns about free-speech lawsuits. In September 2008 the Virginia Supreme Court threw out that state’s anti-spam law and overturned the conviction of a large-scale spammer citing the curtailing of free-speech.
Until there is no money to be made, spam will continue. The best way to stop spam is to invest in a good spam blocker like those by Paretologic and Barracuda Networks. And above all, don’t click on the spam email link, no matter how good the offer sounds!
Kat Delong | September 22nd, 2008
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