What is the economic incentive for a person to send spam - especially
the incomprehensible messages that makes up most spam?  Are there any
recent studies of the "spam economy"?

Hi pwal,
Thanks for your question about spam which is almost always annoying
and inconvenient.
There are basically two types of spam.  Those that try to get you to
part with your money and those that try to get your support for
something (usually a religious group)
There is also (I personally think) a third group, these are people
with whom I have a vague acquaintance who send me 'amusing' pictures
or jokes.

The economics are that if you send your product details to as many
people as possible somebody will buy it.  Of course it´s much more
expensive using the traditional postal service as the sender has to
pay for the printed material the envelope and the postage and maybe
somebody to put the material in the envelope and seal it.  However
with e-mail you can send it to millions of people at very low cost.


There is this (lengthy) study on Spam in PDF format:
UNIVERSITÄT HAMBURG THE LAW AND ECONOMICS OF JUNK EMAILS (SPAM) ...
(Oct 2001)
http://www.frg.eur.nl/rile/emle/Theses/Khong.pdf

And this slightly worrying report:
"There's nothing in the economics of spam to prevent it from growing
until it makes email unusable."
http://www.jaedworks.com/shoebox/smith-bill.html

"The economics of spam scams are simple: near-zero cost of delivery,
so if you find one sucker in a million, you're way ahead."
http://ecommerce.internet.com/news/insights/trends/article/0,3371,10417_797881,00.html

"Spam costs something like $20 per 100,000 to send"
http://commons.somewhere.com/rre/1997/notes7.html

If you have a problem with receiving spam and want to try and stop it,
or just want to find out who is spamming who I highly recommend a
visit to SPAM COP
http://spamcop.net/

Thanks for your question and if you need any clarification just ask.

THX1138

Search Terms
"economics of spam "
://www.google.com/search?q=+%22economics+of+spam+%22&hl=pt&lr=&as_qdr=all&start=30&sa=N

"economics of spam " studies
://www.google.com/search?hl=pt&as_qdr=all&q=+%22economics+of+spam+%22+studies&lr=

While I doubt you're going to find studies on how money is made with
spam, it works like this:

You buy 100,000 e-mail addresses for $300.

You send 300,000 spam e-mails for 3 different products.

15 people by your product that makes you a profit of $50.

15 x $50 = $750

Profit of $450.

Repeat sequence over and over.

This is not a real accurate example, but that's pretty much how it
works.  With 100,000 people, somebody has to buy and you can make a
profit off of just a couple people.

xemion-ga

Hmmm... all I can say is that at least the people at spamradio.com are
putting it to good use :)

I believe that most spammers do not make money. The internet is still
expanding
and there are allways new pople just discovering it. Some of them,
small portion
of them, is a) computer illiterate b) stupid c) addicted to 'get rich
quick'
schemes.
Theese are the people who shell out $30 - $300 for address disks and
software
and they are flooding our mailboxes. They never make any money, since
(obviously) the come-on (if just one in 1000 buys) does not work. In
most cases
even if that 'one' would want to buy he could not, since the message
is blank,
garbled, URL is not there, 'click here' does not work. They give up
after three
month and new suckers come in.  Note the turnover.
SO, the real economics is not visible; people who make money are those
selling
our addresses and selling the 'advertise on internet' kits.
The search term which answers your question is:
"direct advertising, make money, internet"
They are others, but theese 'sucker spammers' make about 60% of my
junk.
Good news is this: as we get close to 90% penetration, the supply of
suckers  will diminish. If I am correct, then effective way to fight
spam would to make 'selling addresses' illegal, rather then targetting
spammers. I do however
believe (and hope) thet technical means (tagged mail) will solve the
problem
before government will do anything effective.

Recent study I saw said that less than 1 percent of spam, (uce, bulk
email, etc.), received a positive response. However, due to the low
cost of sending spam, as opposed to telemarketing or postal mail, it
becomes cost effective and even profitable.

From personal experience, response rates for even solicited "spam" can
be very low -- well under 1%.  The 0.005% buy rate (vs. a response
rate, which is simply responses and not necessarily purchases) assumed
by xemion (15 sales from 300,000 emails sent) is probably pretty
accurate for unsolicited spam.

scottso

I admit that I used spam to advertise one of my websites and most of
the time my proffit went up about $200 a day for several days after I
completed the mailing. There are people who abuse it and fall for the
"quick to get rich" schemes, but there people, like me, who know what
they are doing by building multi-level security from ani-spammers and
are making a lot of money from gathering millions of their own fresh
addresses and profitting from mailings send. The trick is to get the
person's attention, to not annoy the person and to build a healthy
relationship with a potential customer who did not request the email
but might like the product and/or service you are offering. In the
world of internet, spam may sound like a bad thing, but it is
Extremely Essential if you want to have any success. I have over
350,000 hits a day and most of the traffic came from techniques that I
personally think are not very common. Making over $350 a day from a
single credible website is not a dream, but could be a reality; it
just takes a lot of brains and, of coarse, sacrifices.