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RC Car Craze: The Spam Connection
Rick Zeman writes "The Washington Post is reporting that the latest toy craze, miniature radio-controlled cars, is actually fueled by spam, and that spammers are actually helping brick and mortar retailers.
Dunno about you guys, but I get a couple of those a day...and I've resisted the 'temptation.'" The Washington Post wants to know your age, ZIP code and sex, and even provides you with hints on the first two.
...or read
the same story on MSNBC.
It's a lot easier than boycotting 3rd world child labor or commercial software. To bad grandmothers and perverts are the true targets of spam; not us.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
...the spam has caused me to NOT buy these things. I figure if they are going to spam, the product must rank right up there with the penis + breast enlagement pills.
I think Santa got me one of the Evolution Mini-RC cars. I saw them on ThinkGeek waaaay back. It wasn't until recently I noticed the spam. As far as I can tell, the ones going around in spam are the junkier versions. I think it's just another attack of people trying to sell cheaper imitations much like the Furby craze, which spawned tons of imitations that lacked the features of the original.
As a complete R/C addict, I'm quite happy to see some spam that I'm actually interested in for once. Although I'd never buy the junk that RadioShack or other such places are trying to pass off as RC cars - Yokomo make a mini RC car called the Puchimaru, which is of far higher quality./ index.html
http://www.yokomousa.com/kits/puchimaru
So what's the problem with spam being used to sell RC cars anyway? It's not like it's the first thing to be advertised via spam, and it certainly won't be the last. After all, if they're getting 1/3 of the people who recieve the spam to buy the cars, people must actually not mind recieving this certain spam, right?
-Nutter
If you want to spend money on an R/C car, don't go for this mini crap. My little brother can't handle the 1/10 scales very well yet, so he got one of these mini cars. They don't last very long. It was exchanged once because the steering went bad on him, and the second one did the same thing. Spend your money on a bigger R/C car. It's definitely worth it.
Why yes I am paranoid! Thanks for asking!
Ya, I thought those were pretty cool, and I was just about to buy one until I start get those SPAM messages. I was so sick of deleting and sifting through them I said fsck them and bought something else.
forget it.
I have a girlfriend who brought me back a bagful of these from Japan last summer. There's a reason why they're popular: they're fairly cool, relatively cheap, and they appeal to the geek-gadget demographic. And most of mine are still working, pretty odd for a cheap toy. I wonder how many of the second-generation knockoffs will still be working six months later.
And $500? Talk about cheap. ;) 1/8 off-road cars can cost well over $1500, even each of my 1/10 off-road cars have about $1000 in them..
-Nutter
The spam model is based off of the traditional direct marketing blanket campaign where you throw out as wide a net as possible and see what comes back.
While spam has a lower effectiveness than tradtional snail mail campigns, it nontheless pays becuase some people are interested in buying what the spammers sell (even when its a scam, unfortunately).
If you believe in the free market, then there is nothing inherently wrong with advertising in any medium (though in Soviet Russia there is...).
The problem with spam is the lack of regulation that balances consumer protection with the free speech rights of advertisers.
Clearly, as consumers we should be able to opt out of receiving spam without having our email address validated and resold, be confident that the advertisements we receive are not fraudulent, have transparency as to which company has sold our information, and importantly, have the ability to register to not receive any spam from any companies.
Spam is an easy target for criticizing as it's annoying and the lack of regulation makes it pernicious. Our focus shouldn't be to persecute those sending it, but to push for strict legislation that balances the rights of the consumer with the rights of the advertiser.
----
in Soviet Russia, sig signs off you.
I'm a friend of a friend of the working class.
I'm so sick of spam, giant annoying flash ads, ten minutes of comercials before a movie I payed to watch starts, and related things that I can't take it anymore. I eventually broke down and just decided one day that I'm taping tv so I can fast foreward through commercials, going to movies late or just walking out for a while if the movie hasn't started yet no matter how crazy the people I go with think I am, and keeping flash turned off. It's actually turned out rather well in the long run, as I was quickly reminded that books will not only more often have a better story to tell than most television, there's no comercials!
And that's why I'm surprised to not see much more of an outcry among mainstream advertisers about things like spam. I admitidly must have had a pretty low tolerance to start with, but everyone has a breaking point and this constant bombardment of brain numbing noise could ruin it for everyone if it gets too prevalent.
Everything will be taken away from you.
The key change I would like to see is a model in which the SMTP server is replaced with one that must hold the "payload" content of the message, and instead send a token message that contains the IP address at which the full message resides, other header data, and a reduced hash of the message contents so that the message cannot be tampered with once its been "sent" without being rejected.
Once an server is identified as having sent spam, the owner of the server can nuke the payload message, therefore making the tokens a pointer to nowhere, so client software ignores the message. Or, if the server owner is not cooperative, a blackhole can be applied to the server, causing client software to discard tokens sent by this server (even for not-yet-read messages that were sent before the alert was issued) so that the message content is never delivered to the user.
Of course, the few users who actually want spam can continue to get it so long as the sender can find bandwidth willing to allow it, and the users decide to ignore any blacklisting. Nobody's first amendment rights are being denied, just every step in the process gets a chance to opt out.
What harm does it do for them to ask?
They can better target their advertising...so what? They know who's reading their web site--great. Maybe they'll write more stories that I'm interested in. If the /. link warns of registration ahead, then I know that I have to trade some of my information for their information. They're trying to make a buck, just like everybody else. Good for them. I know that it will be used to advertise at me. Besides--the most important point is this:
I can choose to lie, or not. Usually I just wait for a no-reg link to appear in the comments. It saves me from all these little dilemmas. (Dilemmae?)
I ask your opinion--as a professional journalist--who is going to pay you for your work if news organizations have trouble making money?
~Idarubicin
Actually, these sites are well aware that a lot of people use junk data. That's okay -- it's not being used for anything critical at this point (and IMO will onlt be 'critical' if/when sites start moving to pay models en masse). The more interesting & useful side effect of having these registration models is that it provides an anchor to *far* better demographic modelling of the site.
From this point of view, you could tell them that you, NYT reader # 07593146, are a twelve eyed Tralfamadorean that lives on the fourth planet from Betelgeuse for all they'd care, because you're still giving them the data that they *really* need:
Mission accomplished. This kind of profiling is all based on simple traffic analysis, and most of it isn't really possible without a pervasive registration scheme. This is a damn goldmine to web publishers. If people actually trusted the publishers & were honest on their profiles, that would be icing on the cake, but playing games like this really isn't as much of an obstacle as you might be hoping.
Hey, the people running the site are computer nerds too, they think the same way you are and know the same tricks you do. There is no race of Tralfamadoreans around Betelgeuse, but that doesn't stop them from being attentive... :)
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
The reason I'm interested in those questions is because I'm inclined to believe that people can't even imagine a world without (for lack of a better term) "push" advertising. I would be curious to discover what their choices would be if given alternatives.
I don't mean any offense, but your handle suggests to me that you're a very pragmatic person and if that's the case, good! We need pragmatic people to keep people like me from thinking too far out of the box. Your factoid re: magazine cards was very informative and suggests that you're more informed than I am about marketing issues. Have any links to info that I can read?
--K.
Sig: Bad people happen. Try to avoid being one of them.