Slashdot Mirror
Porn Dominates the Spam Battlefield
An anonymous reader writes "New York Times has published an article that explores the economics that control what type of spam shows up in your inbox. The study was done by CipherTrust and shows that porn spam is 280 times more effective than spam advertising pharmacy drugs. Paul Judge offered the following towards an explanation: 'If you look at some of the oldest and most successful forms of business on earth, they revolve around sex.'"
pron spam is 280 times more effective than spam advertising pharmacy drugs
I prefer the Combo ads, where it tries to sell you Viagra and shows you pictures of who you could use it on.
Snake oil is snake oil, but free boobies? PRICELESS
We all get it and I'm sure we mostly delete it on the spot with all other SPAM. But I have to admit, if they were to give just a few "freebies" in the SPAM message itself they might be more effective. I mean.. I see a stupid head line, deliberately poor English and a cryptic URL that is typically broken by Outlook Express. Don't make me work for it! :-)
Seriously.. I've been getting more high risk stock SPAMs lately. Almost seems like a securities fraud case waiting to happen.
Slashdot.. where people join together in deliberate ignorance.
Seriously, is this news to anyone? All it takes to learn this is to flip on the TV to any station. Christ, even the local catholic church station. You'll notice they put the prettiest girl they have up on the tube. Why do you think that is?
Sex sells. I love it when they do this on religion stations especially.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
All your spam are belong to porn!
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.
I like the unsubstantiated side-bar claiming that porn spam had a 5.6% click-through rate. I suppose that's 5.6% of delivered spam? How could this possibly be measured? I'm not saying it can't be approximated but a sidebar and a couple of quotes are hardly sufficient evidence.
I hope timothy creates a backslash article on /. for this one! So we can talk about it twice!
In a word... "duh".
What is going to grab anyone's attention more? "We ship quadraphexametaline to your door for a flat rate of $9.99 - click here to order" or "18 year old Mariana Gottemoff does immoral things with a bearclaw - click here to view"
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
simply filter the $ symbol, i did this at home and spam disappeared overnight never to return and as my company has no dealings with anyone using that currency it didnt stop any legit mail from getting through
now if only Gmail would let me do the same we will be onto a winner
I've gone blind and can't see my monitor. Plus my palm is too hairy to click the mouse.
Its not just the spam, dial my sig...
THIS SPACE FOR RENT Call 1-800-555-CARL
And another stunning news report: the sky is blue.
I must be too old, all I get are c 1 a l a s and v 1 @ g r 4 SPAM. Perhaps if I bought some, then I'd start getting porn spam so I could put my prescription to good use...
I have one email address that gets tons of spam everyday, here's a nice random grab (:
From: "Lauren Tom"
Subject: New and hot ladybo y see all of them
Date: Wed, July 5, 2006 11:28 pm
Hot and new s h e m a l e Recently added p
o r n Modern girls like to grant their wish with enormous frankfurters they have
rush inside and enjoy http://www.asianlb.com/ This woman has very huge bolt in her
pants She has knob under her dress and knows how to use it correctly
These exceptional ladies will bring Inimitable amusement for all who visits them
Keen scenes of ladyboys who divert near you are the best to observe
They say porn is one of the early drivers of new visual media, from the printing press to moves to cable to video and dvd to the internet.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Mr. deSouza pointed out that many spammers work on contract for other people's businesses. "If you're contracted by a company that sells watches or drugs, you might be perfectly happy spamming about watches or drugs," he said.
Very true, and this is why I've said for a long time that if we ever want to do anything about spam, there's a way to do it without infringing on anyone's freedom of speech: follow the money. You have the right to send any e-mail you want, including spam, and that's the way it should be. You do not have the right to commit other crimes -- e.g. fraud, practicing medicine without a license, etc. -- just because it's "DIFFERENT, this is on the INTERNET." Go after the people who are paying the bills, and most of the "spam kings" will find themselves out of business in short order.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Certainly sex has been at the heart of a lot of new industries -- Polaroid cameras, VCRs, Internet, camcorders but it isn't the only common thread shared by the spam in my 'junk' mailbox. Almost all of the offers are either illegal or of dubious legality. Fake Rolex watches, under-the-counter drugs, porn, financial scams. The thing that they all have in common is that they cannot advertise through legitimate channels. Spam is the electronic eqivalent of the guy in the trench coat hanging out in the dark alley who makes a furtive offer under his breath as you walk by.
Porn spam is common and effective because sex is one of the basic human needs, so it's natural that more people are attracted to porn spam than Rolex watches for example. This is what first came to my mind when I read the title, and it turned out the article revolves around this idea.
The article requires login by the way, and BugMeNot comes to the rescue.
python>>> q="'";s='q="%c";s=%c%s%c;print s%%(q,q,s,q)';print s%(q,q,s,q)
Which would you click?
A man showing off his muscles with a shrunken dick in a 'ball-squizer' advertizing a big bottle with pills, or, spread leggs.
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
Well, duh . :)
Look at how we were put together. Whether you're a Christian - "Go forth and multiply" - or simply following simple biological design, we were born to breed, all life is.
Using porn - the modern, supposedly "illicit" form of personal pleasure that doesn't involve the use of exterior drugs (not produced by the body) - marketing appeals to our basest instincts. How could it go wrong?
Te Quiero, Puta!
And why not? When a guy thinks with his other head, he tends to make rash and usually flawed decisions. So you let him do the thinking with that and voila, gravy train. Come on, should this be a shock?
Couldn't read the article (I don't subscribe to the NY Crimes [and I was calling it that long before Congress got into the act]) but did they do a breakdown by gender, because of course all the porno spam seems to be aimed at men, so I would think that they would be affected 20 times as much as women. Perhaps there's a new, untapped spam market: porno for women.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
My God, I hope that number is inflated. The economics of spam are always based on, "Well, even if only 1/100 of 1% results in a purchase, it's profitable for them". If 5.6% of porn spams actually are actually clicked through, it means that spam is getting way, way more attention than the threshold, and the spams are never going away, even though only a fraction of those click-throughs result in sales. Crap.
(Looking is, for the most part, free, except that if you're clicking through porn spam you're probably doing it on an un-updated version of IE, and now you're relaying spam, too.)
They also forgot to consider a few points: 1. Someone who wants prescription drugs will either buy on a pharmacy (usually cheaper), or probably ask someone they know before taking into account that weird email that sells X4N4*, z0l0f7 and other medicines. 2. Most people tend to ignore those spams (from pharmacies), as most of the people don't care about that, whereas when it comes to porn, well, one always get a freebie on the website... and everybody loves porn ;)
"Go forth, and be excellent to each other" --Bill & Ted
From the looks of it, porn spam news items on Slashdot are a lot more successful than medical spam news items.
Where were you when the voynix came?
With naked boobies, you can send a sample. Most people are already quite happy to LOOK at some of those milk bars, they needn't swallow to enjoy it.
It's different with pharmacies.
And, don't forget, there's always the hope that you might get free pr0n. Maybe just one or two pics, but hey! Free v14gr4, that's unheard of. Not even a pill.
Not that I'd need it, I just recently enhanced my malehood! I got a new sports car...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
seems Spamhaus is right 80% of spam is by Americans
Name: Digital Assets inc
Last Name: Digital Assets inc
Address: Us Gadsden AL 256 543 7442
City: Gadsden
State: Al
Zip Code: 15769
Country: US
Company:
I have been keeping tally on one of my 'freebie' accounts since June last year.
2005:
Porn = 651
Legit = 1,017
Spam = 302
Phishing = 59
So for for 2006:
Porn = 1,587
Legit = 870
Spam = 1,713
Phishing = 74
Panic now, beat the rush!
I'm just curious if there's somebody who bought something after seeing such spam. Isn't it just waste of time and bandwidth?
Pixel image editor - http://www.kanzelsberger.com
What? The internet is for porn? Say it ain't so!
Seriously, it's all people think about, though perhaps not actively. Sure we love technology, but even when I'm using Mac OS X every few seconds my brain strays to thoughts like "I wish I knew a beatiful woman who uses Mac OS X" or "wow, some naked female professional tennis players could really spruce up the next OS X commercial."
Haiku for you!
hmm, maybe the click rates would be higher if the drug ads offered free porn if you went to their website?
in any case this article is really missing the point - people just don't buy drugs over the internet - duh! drugs from an unknown source can be deadly, whereas porn is harmless and a relatively established internet business.
If you're going to get any ad revenue off this story you're going to have to explain this 'sex' thing to your typical readers.
WOOHOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
I don't remember the last time I got spam... Yup, couple of weeks ago. It's hardly the problem it was.
Deleted
Victory is mine!
Apparently the spammers figure I'm blind or something (maybe from all the porn they think they sold me in the past?), because I'm getting more ringtone spam than anything else lately.
Who told them I can't get it up and I'm underendowed?
Vote Quimby!
1) Donald Trump Wants You - Please Respond (popular recognition)
2) Double Standards New Product - Penis Patch (sexually oriented spam)
3) Body Wrap: Lose 6-20 inches in one hour (body improvement products)
4) Get an Apple iPod Nano, PS3 or Xbox 360 for Free (technology offers)
5) It's Lisa, I must have sent you to the wrong site ("personalized" correspondence)
6) Breaking Stock News** Small Cap Issue Poised to Triple (stock scams)
7) Thank you for your business. Shipment notification [77FD87] (bogus transactional spam)
8) [IMPORTANT] Your Mortgage Application is Ready (mortgage-related scams)
9) Thank you: Your $199 Rolex Special Included (high-end "deals")
10) Online Prescriptions Made Easy (pharmaceutical)
--
Donald Trump wants you to use the Penis Patch, and
lose 6 inches in one hour (check your Rolex) using
your PS3 while you fill out a mortgage application
as your latest stock purchase triples its value...
Disclosure: I am currently employed by a pharmaceutical company, but my low opinion of buying drugs through spam pre-dates my employment.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
Dominates? *snicker*
:D
Best Title in awhile, guys.
What about children who get porn spam?
I think the spammers should be held accountable for that.
How do they know they're not spamming children with advanced sex education?
Pills? Get harder, hairier, whateverer in order to get sex.
Make Money Fast? Attract sex partners with all that dough.
Fake rolex? attract idiotic materialistic sex partners with that bogus bling.
Collidge Degree Quik? Attract the bookworm type with your misspelt diploma.
Seriously, can anyone think of spam that doesn't convert to sex?
Man, you really need that seminar!
Sex sells. I love it when they do this on religion stations especially.
Does human beauty always allude to sex?
Beauty is a broad concept. And appeals to us in many different ways.
Here's something from Wikipedia on beauty ( I really hate to throw obvious Wiki quotes around, but people sometimes don't do the basic background research themselves )...
An "object of beauty" may be anything that reveals or resonates with a personal meaning. Hence religious and moral teachings have often focused on the divinity and virtue of beauty, to assert natural beauty as an aspect of a spiritual beauty (ie. truth) and to define all self-centered or materialistic pretensions as based in ignorance....
Paintings can be beautiful, so can Sunset, cars, locations, children. Don't you think your mother is beautiful?
In summary, I'd argue that beauty is basically implies a pleasant fascination in something. The exact nature of the feeling depends a lot on the situation.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
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The news isn't that sex sells, it's that sex sells at a rate 280 times higher than that of its closest competitor.
The closest competitor is pharmaceuticals (e.g., ads for Viagra/Cialis/Levitra).
So it's not just that sex sells at a rate 280 times higher than that of its closest competitor, it's that sex sells at a rate 280 times higher than that of its closest competitor, which is also sex.
As far as volume, my yahoo account got on someone's list and I get 3 or 4 e-mails a day for various "Vouchers" (This WAS a low-spam account, until I joined a few linux mailing groups). If half the vouchers were real I'd have so much free crap I wouldn't know what to do with it. Coach handbags, United airlines tickets, Pizza-hut, and about a dozen or so other brands. No porn though that I've noticed.
My hotmail account on which the spam filter used to work really nicely and send everything to junk, has recently stopped. Not a single e-mail is being caught by the spam filter and is showing up right in my inbox. Its mostly porn, I'd say 90%, or v1aaagrrrra (sic).
I'm trying to figure out the balance here: All spammers ever offer me is porn and penis enlargement pills. What I want to know is, if all I'm doing is jacking off to porn, why the hell does it matter how big it is?
This is not my sandwich.
I mean, if it it's the goatse man
---
We spoke for about a half an hour. I don't recall a thing we said. - Colorblind James Experience
But doesn't Viagra also revolve around sex?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
"Christ, even the local catholic church station. You'll notice they put the prettiest girl they have up on the tube. Why do you think that is?"
...
- They were out of boys?
- Because the prettiest boys were helping Father Jim with his frock?
- The prettiest girl is the one whose oral skills the TV producers like to capture with their cameras?
Sorry, my bar mitzvah stand-up calendar is all full for now
I wish gmail would let you block foreign languages. I get a lot of chinese and korean spam and even if it wasn't spam i wouldn't be able to read it.
However, these filters are really unfortunate for people who do work in things like the mortgage business... they have lots of problems with spam filters catching their email.
What is going to grab anyone's attention more? "We ship quadraphexametaline to your door for a flat rate of $9.99 - click here to order" or "18 year old Mariana Gottemoff does immoral things with a bearclaw - click here to view" Depends what you mean by bearclaw. Do you mean the donut or the toenail of a large mammal?
Some were funny...
I prefer the Combo ads, where it tries to sell you Viagra and shows you pictures of who you could use it on. - neonprimetime
So, I'm curious, what did you really think of this exciting article? I mean the first time you posted I know you were just trying to boost your Karma, but now please take the time to actually RTFA and tell me what you thought.Snake oil is snake oil, but free boobies? PRICELESS - l5rfanboy
In a word... "duh". What is going to grab anyone's attention more? "We ship quadraphexametaline to your door for a flat rate of $9.99 - click here to order" or "18 year old Mariana Gottemoff does immoral things with a bearclaw - click here to view" - oahazmatt
Some actually provoked thought
simply filter the $ symbol, i did this at home and spam disappeared overnight never to return and as my company has no dealings with anyone using that currency it didnt stop any legit mail from getting through - AC
And some were just plain craZy
All your spam are belong to porn! - MrSquirrel
that anybody would consider this newsworthy or a surprise. Everything single thing we do, everything that motivates us, our most basic instincts, revolves around sex. We exist to reproduce. I wish I could remember where I saw this, (paraphrasing, obviously) "the four states of all living things: fight, eat, fuck, sleep." It applies to humans as much as any other animal.
What?
Well, let's put it like this. If Joe Sucker is stupid enough to click on spam, what would his motivation be?
A) spam promising to sell you something (viagra, shares, etc): if you don't intend to buy that, no point in clicking on the link at all.
B) spam promising free porn: well, it might actually have some free pics. You can always close the window later if they start asking for your credit card, email address, etc.
So basically I suspect there's a massive difference in what kind of users they get there. For category A it's probably less clicks, but more of those clicks result in a sale. For category B, I wouldn't be surprised if it generated a lot more clicks, but most of them don't result in anything.
So I don't know if actually 5.6% of people click on porn spam, but you can probably bet that at _least_ 90% of those won't actually buy anything from that site. They'll click, get there, be presented with some attempt to sell them a membership (or a dialer or be asked for their email address), say "no thanks", and close the window. When you correct for this factor, sex probably doesn't _sell_ that great after all.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The article linked to tells us how the click-trough ratios differ for three different types of spam. Fine.
/. abstract arrive at the conclusion that this clicktrough rate determines what type of spam you get?
But how does the
This is unclear to me.
Will I get more porn spam, because that spam is more successful? Or will I get more rolex advertisements, because that has a lower clickthrough ratio and thus needs more spam messages to arrive at the same shop turnover?
Ric Romero? Is that you?
Let's face it... It's a visual medium. If Nigerian scam artists were hotter, and included photos, they'd probably get more traffic, and make more money.
Someday a real rain is gonna come...
Finnegan's Wake called. It wants page 20 back.
The third most successful variety is spam advertising Rolex watches, 0.0075 percent of which get clicked on,
Wow, so many naive users out there.
After a spat of explicit gay insest spam, I switched to a challenge/response e-mail filter... of course, on Linux I was pretty much forced to write my own, since Evolution doesn't have one. I must say, I'm somewhat proud of the result. It's at evochallenge.sourceforge.net.
The sooner we all put them in place, the sooner the spam will go away.
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
So you assume that using someone who is beautiful on the tube equates to using "sex" to sell some concept or idea? Not everyone sees "beauty" in such a simple, animalistic way. And no, every action/decision we make in life does not somehow ultimately lead to satisfying our sex drive.
Well established, publicly traded, legitimate business don't need to SPAM. (Yes. Slashdot can name a dozen exception but they are just that. Exceptions).
Bogus drugs could kill you so sane people (With credit cards etc...) usually prefer to pay the "exorbitant" Walgreen's price for Viagra (Plus the medical fees of the schmuck who proscribes it).
Bogus porn on the other hand is just blurry pictures of _partialy_ nude ugly girls. Again there is the Goatse exception but I have been trying to wipe that image from my mind for YEARS.
Best of all. I have found that in general porn spam dose lead to actual porn. Viagra spam and Nigerian wealth spam on the other hand usually leads to somebody who will take your money, deliver nothing and disappear into the ether.
PS: All my porn came free.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
About this time, during a press conference with Reagan's "drug czar", some intrepid journalist asked for an explanation of the method behind their madness. I discovered then what should have been obvious to us all: The borders cannot be closed tight enough to interdict the drugs, but the "pushers" would not be able to sell their "poison" if there were not a demand for it. So by indoctrinating the next generation of potential drug consumers to reject drugs and by locking away known drug users for offenses as slight as pot seeds in their ash tray, Reagan was using the well understood laws of Economics to win the War on Drugs ®.
Well we all know that there are two things Republican administrations are expert on and those things are Economics and War. After all, when is the last time you saw the Republicans lead us into an unwinnable quagmire and then withdraw in disgrace (uh, before 1975, that is)? Anyway, the Law of Supply and Demand says that if demand drops but supply stays the same then the price must drop as sellers compete to unload their wares to a dwindling number of consumers. How could Reagan have forseen the consequences of the combination of cheap coke from the Columbian cartels flooding the market and making the penalty for posession of a homegrown marijuana joint on par with those for kilos of crack rocks? It was inevitable that the number of young people smoking marijuana would decline while they spent their lunch money on the cheap and seemingly inexhaustible cocaine instead.
'Okay, thanks so much for the history lesson' you are probably thinking, ' but just how does this relate to the problem of porn spam?' Well my boy (or girl), just apply the principles of Reagan Voodoo Economics to this new situation. Imagine it. You're sitting at your desk smoking a cigarette, exhausted, drained, and utterly satisfied by the government regulated, imported foreign prostitute crouching still beaded with sweat on the carpet next to your Dell Dimension. Suddenly a new message pops up in your mailbox. What could that be? "Cum c Nud3 |_ez T33n5" 'Ha', you laugh, clicking the delete button. 'Begone you purveyors of filth. I have no more need of you' See? No demand, no reward to the advertisers, no more spam. Simple economics.
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
Actually the cliche has it wrong: the world's oldest profession is politics. Of course, politics and the ambition that enables it is still fueled by sex... just ask Clinton and Kennedy and all the Congressmen guilty of having a bit too much interest in their interns, at the least. You can work your way down the food chain from there and find all the proof of the connection you need. Politics is just a way of manipulating yourself higher into the gene-pool pecking order when you have little else objective to offer it (the pool, that is).
When was the last time you got a spam about viagra. I doubt pfizer executives spell it v14gr4!