Slashdot Mirror
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?"
"E-mail advertising, which is relatively inexpensive, is one of the few forms of Internet advertising that is thriving..."
According to whom?
Every single person I know complains about spam. Every single one of them deletes without reading the crap. Almost every one of them uses some sort of filtering/blocking.
And no, these aren't all geek-centric folks. Hotmail, yahoo, etc., all have basic filtering in place. Some UCE gets through, but most get filtered to their spam box.
Where the hell are these numbers coming from?
I realize that 1% of 10000 emails sent out is an acceptable return rate, but I wouldn't call it thriving. Show some solid proof that this is true and I will believe you.
Are people out there really this gullible? For pete sake, if I purchased all the products or services offered in spam, I'd be one highly educated, rich, successful, hung to my knee, always hard, in great shape, sexual tyrannosaurus.
And we know that ain't gonna happen.
Sent from your iPad.
Does this really surprise anybody? Doubleclick has been a bunch of capricious, dishonest bastards for as long as I can remember. They were one of the first names associated with evil cookie tracking practices(tm) all the way back in 1995 (and even earlier?), IIRC.
direct email marketing "is one of the few forms of Internet advertising that is thriving"
As someone pointed out above, I wonder what they mean by "thriving." A 0.1% response rate is not particularly "thriving" -- I think it's more because there is no way to punish them for spamming.
Wasn't there some kind of paper published recently that showed that, in one of those game-theoretical situations with two equilibrium strategies (everyone cooperating, or everyone backstabbing each other -- I think it's called the "prisoner's dilemma"), people tended to pick a cooperative strategy if the group was allowed to punish backstabbers? Because IMO, the situation with spamming is very much like the prisoner's dilemma.
I did an experiment one time, I blocked doubleclick and a bunch of other ad sites at my firewall. The problem was, there were so many sites it was like trying to stop a firehose with a bathtub stopper. There have been efforts like the RBL, but they always seem to start charging money. IMHO, this is not just because they are "greedy," it's because their operational costs are too high. And why? Because there are too many spammers. I think the only way to really fight spam is with a distributed solution. Here we'd run into all the network poisoning problems people worried about with gnutella et al. in the early days. Is anyone working on anything like this? Is anyone even talking about it?
It seems like we're getting spammed with spam stories nowadays, not just from slashdot but on zdnet and others as well. Is spam getting worse, or is the spam lobby getting more aggressive, or what? :-)
Just my $0.01
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