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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.
Here, let me beat you over the head for a while...what, too ignorant or stupid to buy a helmet?
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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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i'm sorry, but this is such an awful attitude. spam is being inflicted on millions by a handful of greedy spammers. no one "deserves" to be harmed by it.
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....
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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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!