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DoubleClick Gets Into Spam
keytoe writes: "Well, just when we thought everyone's favorite Privacy Snoop was starting to mellow out a bit, we discover this little tidbit. DoubleClick
is now branching out from the ad serving business into the SPAM business due to the fact that direct email marketing 'is one of the few forms of Internet advertising that is thriving.' Using DARTmail, you can now target your bulk mailings 'based on profile data.' I wonder which profiling data they're talking about. Perhaps, say, all
the data they've been collecting for years?"
Maybe that's no better and I could be wrong but there's nothing in the article to suggest that they are selling actual personal data of any kind as part of this deal.
Wow, 22 comments and no one read the article. It talks about how it's designed to help segment your customers -- while this probably has evil applications, the releases DC is sending out seem to be targeted to, say, Amazon-type companies that want to send emails to their own customer base.
-- q
Remember to be polite, you'll catch more flies with honey than with vinegar
I'm not really interested in catching flies, I am interested in smacking them dead. And I can find better uses for honey than to feed it to flies.
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Doubleclick, to be in the business, will have to abide by the spam laws that states have already passed. This means Doubleclick will be one of the few groups I get spam from that actually add the ADV: prefix, which makes filtering them braindead easy.
I don't see that you can say "Spam is effective" with a straight face.
Canter & Siegal, the original Usenet spammers, gave it up after a year or so. Sanford Wallace, one of the most unrepentant spammers, with a history going back to fax spamming in the late 80s, gave it up. AGIS networks, host to Sanford Wallace, went broke. You can't name a single major company that spams. The only people who spam are pyramid schemers, shady pseudo-pharmaceutical marketers, online pornoographers and internet casinos.
Spam isn't effective, at least not for someone on the right side of the law - it generates too much ill will. Spam me, for instance, and I'll complain all the way to the top, making clear that I won't buy your product or service again.
What spam does have going for it is lack of control by market forces. Conventional ads, tee vee, newspaper, billboard, etc, all get paid for by the advertiser up front, before the consumer makes a choice about buying the product. Those ads must be effective, and must not offend too many potential customers, or the advertiser won't recoup the ad costs, much less sell any product. The consumer who chooses to buy a conventionally advertised product does end up paying the cost of the ads, but only after seeing or hearing the ad.
This isn't true of spammed ads: everyone who recevies a spamvertisement pays some amount for it (dial-up time, CPU cycles, disk space allocation, etc), whether a spammed ad convinces them to buy the product, or revolts them so much they'll never buy from the spammer again.
The Invisible Hand of the marketplace only acts very lightly on spam - spamvertisements can be as lurid and grotesque as possible because of this. That's why we need laws against spamming - market forces don't apply.
Spamming is theft, plain and simple, and spammers must be punished.
Click banner ads etc. if you really hate spam, so that advertisers have a worthwhile alternative.
I see absolutely no moral obligation to provide advertisers with a "worthwhile" alternative. They aren't entitled to my eyeballs.
Perhaps I should also provide murderers with an alternative if I don't like being shot? Or provide con artists with an alternative if I don't like being cheated?
The day advertisers start advertising products for their functionality, durability, and versatility, rather than sexy-lifestyle-fu and blinking lights, I'll consider advertising an honest endeavour.
--G
Now this is just wrong! Just because the web makes up something like half the Internet, depending on how you measure it, does not mean that "Internet ads" == "web ads". Or would you also like to buy only http connectivity from your isp, no mail/news/p2p/...??? They may mean what you say, but spam IS a form of internet ads.
Boohoo! Spam isn't effective! Stop it!
How could you possibly say that a relationship between spam quantity and selling products is demonstrably weak, and then flout reason by not demonstrating?
Do you seriously expect me to believe that business DON'T use analysis to decide what to do? That all business decisions are random, especially at companies we don't like because they email us? That is bordering on troll material, friend.
Regardless of what DoubleClick's true motives are, regardless of how much you want to believe that spam sux0rs and so it doesn't sell products, people are doing it. People would stop doing it if it didn't work. Yes, really!. Spammers LIKE to make MONEY. They're not in it just to piss on your parade. When you can prove to me that spammers are malevolently and anarchistically spamming with stolen commodore 64s (remember, they have no money because spamming doesn't pay), you might have a shred of credibility. In the interim, you're just flamebait.
visit the hwky website for a lyrical genius infusion.
There is a clear difference between what most people refer to as "spam" and double opt-in email marketing. The latter means that you actually entereted your email address on some website requesting information and/or email "deals". Then they emailed you and you had to either reply-to or click on some link in the email to confirm your subscription. This isn't the "Get your university diploma" crap that eveyone complains about and then deletes without reading.
Now I don't know about you, but there are actual online copanies that I don't mind getting emails from. Amazon is one of them. I like to know about upcoming DVD releases and if Amazon emails me about them, I will sometimes read them. How many of you are also signed up to receive American Airlines SuperSaver fares or something similar? This is the type of direct marketing email that we are talking about here.
So when someone is truly interested in a company's products enough to signup for and confirm interest in receiving emails, there is a good chance that at some point that person will buy something based on one of the emails.
I used to work for a company that was one of the first companies to make money using direct marketing email. We were a public company (in the dot-com craze, that is) and the direct marketing email part of the company made double what the online banner advertisements made. It was well into the millions of dollars per quarter range. Now that isn't a ton of many, but it was respectable for the number of people it required to run the company and the very lost cost of sending the emails.
It would be good if their software could connect to a central opt-out server and check each e-mail address before sending out spam. If the address is found in the opt-out server, it's removed from the recipients list.
Also, they should have enforceable message tracing capabilities built-in (not allowing the fake return address spammers use today).
Note: This is not offtopic at all, it is just useless. I think slashdot needs to get more modifiers, ones like "Worthless geek humor" on top of the too general "funny." Also necessary is "Offtopic, but damn interesting" (for obvious reasons) and while we are at it, throw in a "Ontopic, but reading it really is a waste of time."
penis
[[Ay fukkand lyke ane furious Fornicatour]]
Actually, I know people who DO spam, and it is VERY effetive for them. Actually, market forces DO apply. To get the point at which you can safely spam without being shut down by a provider, you have to spend a LOT of money to get tier 1 or 2 bandwidth, and a safe server. Any mom & pop shop that tries to spam is shut down sooner rather than later. But if you have the money to buy the right bandwidth in the right location, you still can make quite a bit of money spamming.
Though I realize double click could care less if SPAM works or not, just as long as companies think it does and they pay double click.
So essentially double click will spam up, while advertising to companies that their SPAM works.
Personally I have NEVER received one single SPAM email that I had even a remote interest in.
For instance, you sign up for a mortgage with a company, and get SPAMed for some 'investment opportunity.' What does the one have to do with the other?
Not to mention phone spam, and fax spam. I get more phone spam than anything. They have ruined my phone totally. Ever day I gotta run downstairs to grab the phone and look that the number is 'out of area' before I Ignore it. They should pay for the energy I burn up and down the steps. My fax machine fires up, only to be some real estate spam. My postal mail box is always busting fresh with spam from the big chain super markets and credit card applications. My olfactory nerves are spammed as I drive by Steve's soulfoud, but that kinda works...As the final insult, my email is spammed.
Watch out, there will be spam on the one dollar bill next...
Bullshit.
If I opted into it, and didn't realize I'd done so (perhaps I'm the dr00ling AOLer you seem to think I am), then show me the opt-in.
That's what "double opt-in" (or more accurately, "confirmed opt-in", the "double" is your industry's language, trying to make it sound unreasonable) is for. Until you can demonstrate to my satisfaction that I opted in, it's spam.
>What I'm saying is, before labeling every piece of mail that you get as spam, try unsubscribing. And yes, I know that some unsubscribe links are fake. What are you going to do? There are also fake breasts and fake watches.
So, because some tits are fake and some Rolexes are fake, and since I wouldn't give up feeling tits, or wearing a Rolex, just because I can't trust the owner of the tits or the seller of the Rolex, I should trust you? Holy non-sequitur, Batman!
The overwhelming majority of the claims of "click here to be removed" are lies. The overwhelming majority of the "You opted in" claims are lies.
So what I'm not gonna do is this: I sure as fsck ain't gonna trust your unsubscribe link, that's what.
And what I am gonna do is this: Find your upstream, and report you to them as a spammer. Don't want the 2000 TOS violation reports? Don't spam.
And if your upstream ignores those reports, what am I gonna do? Well, I'm probably gonna add your netblocks to my private blocklist. Don't want to be blocked? Don't spam.
> And lots of other companies (like mine) that send lots of LEGAL, NON-SPAM, promotional email.
How come (and I don't mean you specifically, I mean the general case over the past few years) every spammer always tries to re-define "spam" in such a way as "Well, whatever we do isn't spam."
If it's in my mailbox, it's unsolicited, and it was generated in bulk, it's spam, and I'll choose to either block the server that sent it, or report it to the sender's provider. What are you going to do?
I realize that 1% of 10000 emails sent out is an acceptable return rate, but I wouldn't call it thriving.
Actually 1% is many times higher than the response rate a spammer needs. A response rate of one hundredth of 1%, i.e. one response out of 10000 recipients, is enough. Do the math. you send 20,000,000 emails at tiny cost (to you), and if you make $50 profit out of each person who responds and one person in 10,000 responds, you've just made 2,000 times $50 which is $100,000. Do it once a month and you're pulling in a million per year. That's why there's a lot of spam - because it's extremely profitable.
The fact that your spamming makes more than 99.9% of the people who receive it very angry, is completely irrelevant if all you're interested in is making money.
If you read these articles you always come upon the same thing: they say, it costs next to nothing to send 50,000 e-mails, if I get a 10-20 hits that's a good return. Spam doesn't work in the conventional sense - no legitimate organization would engage in any kind of advertising that pissed off and alienated so many potential customers. No matter how stupid it is if you e-mail the whole country you're going to get 5 or 10 thousand people deciding to check it out for one stupid reason or another.
Porn addicts will click on the porn site e-mail, because they have no self-control and out of the illusion that because it came to them and it's "random" they aren't really making the choice ONCE AGAIN to blow a wad of cash on masturbation.
Gambling addicts, same exact thing.
Idiots apparently are falling for the get rich quick schemes (and let's face it - a lot of idiots are trying to get rich quick by RUNNING get rich quick schemes).
Look at this Sabrina person they quote in the article. It's clear she doesn't have the slightest shred of repentance for behaving in this reprehensible manner. She's completely clear: as long as she makes a few bucks she has absolutely no concern for the harm her clogging of bandwidth might cause, the time she is wasting, whether she offends people who flatly do not want that kind of material in their inboxes.
The problem is basically noone thinks it's their problem. Look at all the people here saying "oh there's nothing you can do about spammers" or "just use solution X to filter it out." Try to imagine if some phone sex outfit started autodialing the whole country and playing a prerecorded "free sample" There would be massive outrage, a full-scale investigation, you can bet your ass John Ashcroft would be on teevee promising to track these miscreants down. Ah well maybe when that reorganized ICANN takes all this shit over it'll get sorted out.