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DoubleClick Gets Into Spam

Posted by timothy on from the now-with-50-percent-more-evil dept.

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?"

1 of 362 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Spam isn't effective - market forces don't appl by Philbert+Desenex · · Score: 3, Troll

    Clearly, regardless of your intuition or otherwise, Doubleclick thinks that spam is more profitable than banner ads. ... but the only reason to advertise is to sell more products, spam has been around for a while and its presence is only growing, therefore spam must be an effective way of selling products. That is what is plain and simple.

    Oh, please; Are you seriously asking me to believe that any business, especially "natural viagra" spammers, pyramid schemers and an ad company like DoubleClick actually use some kind of analysis to decide what to do? You might as well ask me to believe that Pro Wrestling isn't rigged. It's pretty clear that DoubleClick's backed into a corner by the low rates that people will pay for crappy banner ads. DoubleClick is grasping at straws in the only business they know: lying to people.

    Besides the issue of businesses making decisions on minimal data, you should read what I wrote: spam may be around, but whether the amount of spam is growing or shrinking has little to do with selling products. Your intuition that a relationship exists between spam quantity and selling products is demonstrably weak. Read the article to which you respond.