Spamonomics

The BBC reports on the economics of Spam, from a piece of work by researchers at University of California (Berkeley and San Diego) who took over a Spam network and used it for their own spam messages:

While running their spam campaigns the researchers sent about 469 million junk e-mail messages. The vast majority of these were for the fake pharmacy campaign.

"After 26 days, and almost 350 million e-mail messages, only 28 sales resulted," wrote the researchers.

The response rate for this campaign was less than 0.00001%. This is far below the average of 2.15% reported by legitimate direct mail organisations.

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

Scaling this up to the full Storm network the researchers estimate that the controllers of the vast system are netting about $7,000 (£4,430) a day or more than $2m (£1.28m) per year.

As the researchers note, at about $0.0008 revenue per message, the economics are very tightly tuned - a very small shift in send-side costs (or increase in spam efficiency) can tip it into very poor returns