The commercial effectiveness of spam

While spam is a real scourge for Internet users, it’s also a financial windfall for pirates. The number of illicit mails circulating on the network runs into the tens of billions every year. Spam pollutes networks, mail servers and users’ inboxes. It also carries several types of malware: viruses, worms, Trojans, phishing, etc.

U.S. experiment on the commercial effectiveness of spam

To demonstrate the commercial effectiveness of illicit mail, American researchers took the place of spammers for the duration of a practical experiment. The study was carried out by a team of researchers from theUniversity of California and UC Berkeley. For greater success, they used tools similar to those used by spammers, i.e. a network of bots or zombie machines, and set up the necessary means to receive responses from interested Internet users.

Three mass mailing campaigns were undertaken. In all, 469 million spam messages were sent by the team of American researchers. The first two offered postcards and jokes related to the first of April. During the third campaign, the team offered pharmaceutical products for sale on sales sites created from scratch for the purposes of the survey. In conclusion, the profitability of spam is convincing, even if it is rather limited.

Spam as a marketing technique

Spam is a real marketing tool for some sellers, if used on a large scale. The results of this American study amply demonstrate this. During the first postcard campaign, one person in 265,000 was interested. For the second campaign featuring April Fools’ jokes, one person out of 178,380 responded positively to the spam.

The success of the pharmaceutical sales exceeded the expectations of the research team. Out of almost 350 million spam messages sent, 28 firm orders were received in return. This gives a success rate of 12.41 sales per million spam messages sent. If the average price of orders received was 70 euros, the spammers would therefore earn almost 2,190 euros in return during the third campaign. As the cost of sending 350 million spam messages is around 17,600 euros, it’s in spammers’ interest to keep the cost to a minimum. Some sellers prefer to organize their own mass mailing campaign to reduce costs. The larger the botnet exploited, the greater the return on investment.

Products offered for sale by spammers

Pharmaceutical products aren’t the only ones being sold by Internet spammers. They also offer a number of other items from a variety of fields, including sex, IT, finance, savings, education, training and more. As some categories of spam are more dangerous than others, the best way to keep your IT infrastructure safe is to use up-to-date, high-performance anti-spam software.