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.'"

Comments

Well no shit

[grasshoppa]

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.

Re:Well no shit

[Anonymous Coward]

The news isn't that sex sells, it's that sex sells at a rate 280 times higher than that of its closest competitor.

5.6% Click-Through Rate?

[gvc]

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.

Key line from TFA

[Daniel Dvorkin]

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.

Re:Key line from TFA

[djmurdoch]

You have the right to send any e-mail you want, including spam, and that's the way it should be.

No, you don't have that right, and you shouldn't. It's my mailbox, and you can't use it without my permission.

Go after the people who are paying the bills, and most of the "spam kings" will find themselves out of business in short order.

In your world, where everyone has a right to put something in my mailbox, you'll just start getting mainstream ads instead of scams. I don't want to live in that world.

Re:Key line from TFA

[nacturation]

No, you don't have that right, and you shouldn't. It's my mailbox, and you can't use it without my permission.

If your MTA implements the SMTP protocol, then you've already given your permission. If you want it to be permissions-based, then don't support SMTP... use some other protocol which requires prior authentication. You're saying the equivalent of "they're my ears... you can't make any sounds towards me without my permission".

Re:Key line from TFA

[cswiger2005]

Having an MX record published in the DNS and having a machine listening on port 25 for SMTP does not mean that the owner of that system doesn't have the right to control the usage of that machine. I put a "no UCE" comment in my SMTP banners and make reference to an acceptable-use policy.

The problem isn't that this isn't legally enforcable-- it is-- but that the amount of time and effort required to gain a judgement against an individual spammer is generally prohibitive, so I've gotten a lot more mileage from greylisting and from amavisd+ClamAV+SpamAssassin, but the "no UCE" banner has proved useful from time to time.

By this I mean, I tend to report the spam which gets through to the netblock owner or ISP, the registrar, AND the WHOIS points-of-contact, I've actually had several spammers try to argue that their mail was legitimate in order to avoid having their accounts shut down, but when I pointed out the SMTP banner, I've actually had the registrar or ISP dump the spammer as a client.

[ And no, this doesn't happen that often, perhaps 1 out of 10 or 20 spam reports, but it's still enough to be worthwhile. Network Solutions and GoDaddy seem to be the most responsive, whereas the Joker D/B/A? registrar and most of the Asian registrars seem to not care. ]

There are other tricks, such as listing a few spamtrap email addresses on your website, or perhaps using wpoison.pl or similar tools to try to poison the spam-databases that spammers create by scraping websites for email addrs...

No just sex

[wbean]

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.

Hmmm, interesting idea...

[celotil]

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.'"

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?

Doomed

[Alfred, Lord Tennyso]

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.)

what if??

[westfalen]

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.

Online drugs = huge risk

[andrewman327]

There is a gigantic risk when ordering pharmaceuticals over the Internet without the aid of doctors of pharmacists. You could easily end up with a pill that does nothing whatsoever or worse. Expired or fake drugs could cause serious injury or death. There is not that risk with online pr0n. People screw up their computers badly on some of these websites with spyware, but they generally live to tell about it unless the wife walks in.

Disclosure: I am currently employed by a pharmaceutical company, but my low opinion of buying drugs through spam pre-dates my employment.

Actually...

[TCQuad]

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.

Re:all spam is sex

[LunaticTippy]

Sports spectatorship and war don't have much of a sex-link, but are both huge business. I don't get any spam along those lines.

Re:all spam is sex

[Ed Avis]

Seriously, if you're a hetero man, can you think of anything you do that doesn't have "a slight probability of having sex" as a motive?

Posting on Slashdot?

Re:all spam is sex

[1iar_parad0x]

Sports:
First, if you're a woman you might have a different take on the sport thing. Secondly, cheerleaders aren't there to lead cheers. Third, a male sports commentator can look like a horses end, but a female sports reporter tends to be attractive. Fourth, those beer commercials that inundate your average sporting event sell sex by the boatload. Fifth, SI has a swimsuit issue, but I guess people read it for the articles. I could go on, but you get the idea.

War:
War is greed -- greed for power. Power is sex.

As far as the war spam goes, you obviously don't get the 'Limbaugh Letter'.