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Spammers get rich on 0.00001% Response Rate

by Andrew Smith on 14/11/08 at 10:06 am
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Ever wondered why spammers continue sending their junkmail through, when nobody you know ever looks at it?

MarketingVox and the BBC reported this:

Here’s the secret: high volume and a virally-expanding network, which means even the tiniest response rate can produce millions of dollars in profit per year.

Computer scientists at the University of California, Berkeley and San Diego conducted a month-long study of the Storm Network, a spam operation that hijacks home computers to relay junk mail. At its peak, Storm could have used over one million machines simultaneously as conduits for spam.

To gauge how well junk mail converts, a pharmacy site was invented where users could “buy” an herbal remedy to enhance their sexual capabilities. (They received an error message upon pushing a button to submit credit card details.)

“After 26 days, and almost 350 million e-mail messages, only 28 sales resulted,” researchers found, a total response rate of less than 0.00001%. (Legitimate direct mail operations typically glean a response rate of 2.15%.)

“Taken together, these conversions would have resulted in revenues of $2,731.88 — a bit over $100 a day for the measurement period.”

Scaled for Storm’s girth, the actual spam network is estimated to be netting about $7000 per day — over $2 million per year.

Now if we could just hunt down those 28 idiots who still fall for spam and keep the industry going, the world would be a better place.

Andrew Smith is the pedantic systems guy behind Live Alchemy, a SA e-commerce company. Andrew writes for Ideate in an attempt to make the world a more efficient place. View more articles by Andrew Smith.

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