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Spam Costs U.S. Companies $22B Annually
KoReE writes "According to this CNN article, a study at the University of Maryland says the loss of productivity from spam is costing U.S. companies $22 billion per year."
Of course, they also say people get 18.5 spam per day, and I'm tipping in at 20x that.
Of course they also say people get 18.5 spam per day, and I'm tipping in at 20x that.
Yeah, their estimate is really low. I mean, everyone runs a website that gets millions of hits a day. They apparently don't realize this.
I believe that any company that is too ignorant to install protections on their systems, or too stupid to find someone to do it for them, deserves to lose their money.
A telephone-based survey of adults who use the Internet found that more than three-quarters receive spam daily. The average spam messages per day is 18.5 and the average time spent per day deleting them is 2.8 minutes.
2.8 minutes to delete 18 e-mails? That's 10 seconds per mail, man that's ineffective. I'd guess the companies would save billions if their employes learned how to read and respond faster, or at least if they learned that if the e-mail subject says "c1al|z", it IS spam, no reason to verify it by reading the thing.
The real problem that I noticed from the study is that 4% of people have bought something advertised through spam. That's the real problem. If everyone would just ignore it, and get there *cough* all important pills elsewhere (try Mexico!) then none of us would get spam. It's a simple cost to benefit ratio, as long as enough people buy things off spam, spammers will continue to operate.
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These kind of 'calculation' assume that 100% of the time an employee is 'working' is productive work. Trust me, it is not, especially when the employee has unmonitored access to the net.
Now I don't say that employees SHOULD be productive 100% of the time. I just say that the time spent deleting spam is probably taken on 'unproductive' time anyway, not on things that need to be done.
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Of course they also say people get 18.5 spam per day, and I'm tipping in at 20x that.
Who's fault is that? It's not like there isn't tools to help filter that out.
As far as costing $22 billion a year, I'd say that's actually quite low. Considering what commercial antispam software costs are, how many people are actually on the web, how much bandwidth this stuff is eating up, and how much processor time is being used to filter out what CAN be filtered out. You also can't forget something as nominal as the extra electricity that's being used by devices, either the extra devices or the extra power used by existing equipment with a higher load on them. I see it being closer to the hundreds of billions, if not well past that.
This sounds a lot like the wildly fictitious "cost of hackers" reports that we have all seen before.
You don't see me declaring that theifs have cost me $120 because I have locks on my doors, do you?
I know that this is a claim of lost productivity, but people sitting in front of computers aren't 100% productive. Expecting them to be so is absurd, and pinning their less-than-perfect output on spam is just scapegoating. We all hate spam, but this is just the usual cost-hunting nonsense....
Surely the profits on spam, selling the hardware, selling the services, etc. are large, otherwise no one would do it. SO, some people are making money on it, others are losing money on it. Does it equal out?
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If SPAM costs $22B to companies, can't they invest another $22B to push the govt into making a DECENT law vs SPAM?
While we in the internet community *hate* SPAM you do bring up a good point. Certainly SPAM sells products and services otherwise we wouldn't be inundated with it.
I wonder what kind of revenue SPAM adds to the economy as a whole.
Anyone have any insight to this?
Instead of raising your voice, try strengthening your argument.
There is a certain part of the population who will buy into anything. Generally they are those who would have been eaten by wolves long ago if it weren't for civilization trumping evolution. In this (relatively) enlightened age, we still have people making a mint as fortune tellers, televangelists, runners of Ponzi schemes, 'multi-level marketing', charity scams, and so on. In fact, I think that many people's tastes run to the untruth told in sonorous, comforting tones.
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They have to average the few people like you with the ones like me who get perhaps 2 per month. If you don't want spam, don't put you email address out on the net.
Someone should do a study about how much Slashdot cost companies in productivity each year.
I suspect that, while the figures these studies come up with are dramatic, they don't actually reflect very much actual loss of "productivity." If time is money, and each minute equals a certain amount, then millions of employees taking several seconds to delete each spam over the course of a year is going to add up. But time isn't money; time is time. American companies need to chill out a bit.
A funny, but misleading, comment. Slashdot's popularity has little to do with how much spam Taco gets. He could have posted the same contact info at PeterLorreFansUnite.com and the spam spiders still would have found him. He'd be getting roughly the same amount of spam even if his address was posted on one of the most obscure sites on the net.
I publish Vegan.com and until I abandoned the domain for use of email last autumn I was getting something like 2000 spams a day. And as much as I'd like to think otherwise, I suspect Slashdot gets a tiny bit more traffic than Vegan.com ;)
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
Perhaps most striking is that this figure is 0.2% of GDP. Assuming that this money is lost production, then we could boost GDP by 0.2% a year by solving the spam problem. This is a big boost! Of course its really not that simple, but you get my point.
My spam inflow is increasing each and every month:
Jul 2004: between 22000 and 23000
Nov 2004: between 38000 and 39000
Dec 2004: 45663
Jan 2005: 59097
Feb 2005: ~3500 so far
I may be a lowly AC here, but these are real numbers. (I'm not in front of my email right now and I don't remember the numbers for other months.)
Needless to say, it gets annoying to delete ~2000 unsolicited commercial emails each and every day. My legitimate emails number less than 50 per day.
2.8 minutes x 200 days x 100,000,000 workers with email = 56 billion minutes ~= 1 billion work hours. The median hourly wage is $18.
but using the time it takes to delete spam as the basis for determing its economic impact is ridiculous
Wrong.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
You say spam only takes 5 seconds to realise and delete. The spammer is only taking five seconds of your time. What's the big deal? He shouldn't have to pay for doing this to tens of thousands of people because it only wastes a few seconds of their time, right?
Wrong.
Lets take TV ads. A nice short five second TV ad. It only takes up five seconds of everyones time. Maybe millions of people are looking at it, but what's the big deal eh? So how come then advertisers pay millions of dollars every year in order that these five second ads be shown to viewers? Same goes for ads on billboards, radio magazines, blimps, football stadia, buses, T-shirts, people's foreheads and on web banners. They should all be free right?
But spam is even worse than all these other forms of advertising because you cannot ignore spam. You must take the time to recognise it and delete it. If someone sends you spam you cannot look away. With all other forms of advertising, bar junk mail, it costs you the same amount of effort and time to look at the ad as it does not to. That's yet another reason why spam is so evil.
Spam is profitable. That's a fundamental fact. You need to make it either illegal or unprofitable or both. But how to do this without killing regular email? See the ant-spam response sheet for more info on that one.
May the Maths Be with you!
>No, you are wrong.
Actually I think I'm right. Employees aren't 100% productive. That's life. I would bet that 2.8 minutes is statistically negligible in terms of total time a person spends not 100% focused on their job each day. And even in your laser printer example, if I spend an hour not working because the laser printer is down, as long as I still complete the same amount of work that I would have completed had the printer been up, that laser printer outage did not cost the company any of my productivity for the day.
If spam gets so bad that a person has to factor in additional time in their day to deal with it, that's another issue. But the study's conclusion that 2.8 minutes, spread throughout the day, totals a loss to the economy of $22 billion, is misleading.
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As some employees claim to read the mails in question, some have even purchased the products advertized, it appears that the bulk of this cost isn't that the mails are sent but that the employees are willfully seeking distractions in the first place. I would call this the usual cost-hunting nonsense, because people sitting in front of modern computers are not machines.
These are web-connected, multi-tasking, bright-colors-and-lights computers, and expecting employees to stay constantly focused on the task at hand is folly, at best.
I mean, look at me. I'm checking out slashdot while waiting for my build to finish when I could be answering work emails or reading code that I'm about to change. It is a personal decision that one could construe to have cost the company money, but it's really more a part of conducting business with human employees.
If you had read the article in question, you would have found that, of those surveyed, the average time supposedly spent deleting the 18.5 spam messages received per day was 2.8 minutes, rather than 12. I spend more than 2.8 minutes per day going to the restroom.
Do we see reports on CNN saying that allowing employees to use the facilities costs businesses $44 Billion/year? Should we all be in diapers to increase productivity? Would it increase productivity to be in diapers? I know that this is an inevitable result of employing non-slave labor, but the point here is that attempting to quantify these costs in an attempt to demonize spam is an exercise in futility.
A) No spam at work.
I guess the intranet monkeys who work for Deloitte & Touche are doing SOMEthing right.
B) No spam at home.
After getting fed up, I redirected my spam-infested email address to an autoreply which posed a simple riddle to determine my new email address, that humans who knew me could figure out but not machines. My new email address is owned by my domain, and THAT in turn gets redirected to my GMail account. When I picked the account, I made sure it wasn't easily guessable, and longer than a few characters... and when I need to enter in an email address on ANY site online, I use a mailinator.com disposable email address if at ALL possible. Hey, no spam at all! Zilch! How about that? Why is this so hard in this day and age???
Maybe I should start an antispam consulting practice. Clean all this shit up real fast...