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Crazy Stats on Spam
gtaylor writes "An article in the Korea Times says that market research firm Emforce has established that South Korean internet users average about 1600 pieces of spam annually, summing to around 39 billion pieces of spam per year. According to the same story, Americans receive about 2500 pieces of spam per year." I figured that I get somewhere around 30-40,000 pieces of
spam annually. Lucky me... I get *this* statistic to be on the other
side of the bell curve :)
Average Internet User Receives 1,613 Spam e-Mails Per Year
By Kim Deok-hyun
Staff Reporter
An average Internet user is receiving a yearly average of 1,613 unsolicited e-mail advertisements, or spam, a local Internet marketing solution developer reported yesterday.
According to Emforce, some 24.12 million domestic Internet users receive 38.9 billion occupational ad e-mails for such things as weight-loss schemes, lures to pornographic sites or other marketing efforts.
On a daily basis, an average Internet user was found to have gotten 4.4 advertisement e-mails of some sort, the report said.
For instance, Daum Communications, the country's biggest free e-mail service operator, estimated that around 40 percent of the e-mails going to its subscribers are unsolicited ads.
Last year, International Data Corp., a global market research firm, said that the average daily volume of e-mail around the world was some 10 billion, and will explode to 35 billion by 2005.
In comparison with the U.S., believed to have some 11.52 million Internet users, the volume of unsolicited ad e-mails this year was around 289 billion, and an average American Internet user receives some 2,509 spam per year, the report said.
``This year, e-mail marketing is poised as an advertising tool for both online and offline companies,'' the company pointed out.
However, it added that consumers are nervous about the flood of unsolicited e-mail, and some are now fighting back with a campaign to halt the unsolicited ads. The company said more accurate customer information is needed to avoid such setbacks.
kdh@koreatimes.co.kr
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
But if they ban spam, then how would I learn how to MAKE MONEY FAST, or WIPE OUT CREDIT CARD DEBT, or BUY VIAGRA NOW, or even find out that SUZY IS HOT for me???
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
This is actually a very important question in the fight against spam. People argue over what it is.
Many people want a definition that includes any sort of mail that annoys them. You will never get wide agreement on something like that.
The best course is actually to find a minimal definition which includes most such mail (enough to solve the problem and take back our mailboxes) but almost deliberately misses out on a small fraction. That way everybody can agree that the minimal definition describes something to be stopped, even if there is more they would like stopped.
That way the definition can be used in whatever means you plan to stop spam, be it contracts and TOS, laws, blacklists, new protocols, filters etc.
The definition I use is very short and clear -- "bulk mail from a stranger."
You have to fine tune it a bit with definitions of the bulk threshold, and a more precise definition of stranger, but I feel it works, and hits 99% of the stuff I receive that might be called spam.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation