Spammer actually arrested
 

Via Fark:

http://www.internetnews.com/xSP/article.php/2206311

Usually I excerpt a few paragraphs from stories like this, but in this case I need to highlight two sentence fragments:

...accused of sending more than 825 million unsolicited e-mails...

...prosecutors believe he made little money from his endeavors.

And there you have it: the REAL story on spam is that it's so worthless in advertising terms that 825,000,000 messages do not produce enough business to make money.

That's what I have never figured out... how can you make any money advertising in a medium that will almost universally piss off your customers? (ditto for telemarketing.) The claim is, "oh, the up-front costs are so low it only take a small response rate to make a profit." But I've always been suspicious.

If you piss off 999 people to the extreme and get a last one to buy, then a fortune can be made. The Inky carried a series of stories 10+ years ago about a King of Spam with offices in the Ft Washington Industrial Complex (and elsewhere). He started with fax spam and moved on to internet spam. Made millions.

Does not matter how many are pissed. All that matters is the number who buy into it. Once knew a boiler room phone employee who could make people buy products he knew to be a scam. Did not care. He got paid - and was good at it - so he claims. But then I never fully trusted anything this guy said even though he was quite frank with me. Not that he was lying to me. He may have been lying to himself - a big difference.

It's not just the profit in that one sale. It's the mentality of a spammer that is curious and unusual - just like any other snake oil salesman.

I still don't buy it. Let's say you magically acquired a database with the correct emails of 500,000 people in it.

And let's say you have an herbal viagra substitute that you paid $0.15 per bottle for and you're selling it for $20. And 999 out of 1000 ignore your spam but the other 0.1%, or 500 people buy it. You've just made $9,925 (let's ignore that you probably have other expenses besides actually purchasing the product).

That's pretty good... but where does the next $9925 come from? I'll buy that some people will go for it, but is it a sustainable market? When you hit the same 500,000 people the following week with an ad for breast enlargement cream, are the same 500 going to pony up again? Yeah, I know there's a sucker born every minute, but even if folks don't wise up they'll run out of money.

A lot of that going around.:thumb: