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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.
Since I read about a new spam study every other day, I'm wondering if that $22B price tag includes the cost of all the studies being done about the cost of spam?
Here, let me beat you over the head for a while...what, too ignorant or stupid to buy a helmet?
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
>Time wasted deleting junk e-mail costs American
>businesses nearly $22 billion a year, according
>to a new study from the University of
>Maryland... The average spam messages per day
>is 18.5 and the average time spent per day
>deleting them is 2.8 minutes.
Using this same logic, I would guess that Solitaire, Minesweeper, etc. cost American businesses at least $200 billion per year. I hate spam as much as the next guy, but using the time it takes to delete spam as the basis for determing its economic impact is ridiculous. A much more accurate number would be the amount of time/money companies use to prevent spam from coming in and going out of their systems, the amount lost to phishing and other scams, etc.
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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.
http://www.pterrys.com
I spent 5 minutes today scratching myself when I got into work. Now if everybody in the world does that, it costs $512823812937123 TRILLION DOLLARS every other minute! Then you'll get angry CEOS who will want to enforce rules to only higher ugly women, or remove them from the work force.
This is just more serious bullshit. If they really want to do a study. See how much money is spent on men looking at women's breasts at work. They will find out that is 123190238127398071273891029837129387 TRILLION DOLLARS EVERY minute.
Do these studies ever take into account that people can't spend every single waking second at work doing work, and that it neccessary to sometimes do something different. Although spam does differ, where it is a nusance, and as such it does waste peoples time constantly. But the way the factor it by putting a value on an employees time is very in accurate.
Treat me like a marketing stat, and I'll treat your movie like a series of ones and zeros
Since I read about a new spam study every other day, I'm wondering if that $22B price tag includes the cost of all the studies being done about the cost of spam?
/.?
All of these "annual amount of money lost due to X" studies are bullshit.
This is saying that $22B a year is "lost" due to people spending an average of 2.8 minutes a day deleting emails.
Well, how much paper has email saved over the years? How much time has email saved? How much does taking a dump cost businesses annually? What about reading
I've been hearing these "take a miniscule amount of thing X and multiply it by the number of people Y and report REALLY BIG NUMBER Z" studies all my life.
Who cares?
Lets do a more interesting and relevant study for people for a change. How many hundreds of millions of dollars would be saved if we switched to a 4 day workweek? How about the quality of life for everyone having at least 3 day weekends every week? That sounds interesting.