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
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!
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
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...
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)
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!
The best spam email I ever got was the one saying "Genuine fake rolexes"
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?
If i'm not mistaken the img's from spam isn't included in the email itself, but it's on a webserver, so if you simply count the number of send spam vs number of unique visitors to those img's you have the delivery rate, check those ip's against the ip's of the people following the link and you not only have the click-through rate, but you also have the number of people who click-through more then once ;-)
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.
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...