"If everyone hated spam, it would disappear. But like the traditional direct-mail marketers and telemarketers who came before them, spammers survive public outrage, filters, lawsuits and regulations because innumerable times a day, somebody, somewhere responds with money"
This may sound reasonable on the surface but may
also be 100% false.
Spammers need money to survive personally which
may or may not come from their spamming. Even
that is suspect, how many people sink their life
savings into going into a business and lose it
all?
That said, all spammers really need are advertisers to
pay them. Whether anyone ever responds to those
ads is a different question.
There's a famous marketing saying: Only half
of my advertising works, now if I could just
figure out which half!
The point is businesses spend on lots of
advertising that returns nothing. But
whoever they're paying still makes money,
there are no guarantees.
You'd think the marketeers would realize this
and stop paying the spammers. But real life
is not so simple. Maybe it will eventually
start working? Or maybe it's worthwhile because
it puts the product name or concept in front
of people and they'll buy it through some
other means.
It's not like every commercial on TV
causes you to immediately run out and buy the
product or has any feedback whatsoever as to
its effectiveness. Yet billions are spent on
getting those TV ads in front of you.
But more importantly, spam is CHEAP. So who
cares, "give the trailer trash another $100 to
send another 100M messages we're too busy to
figure out if it's worth the lousy 100 bucks"
you can imagine the advertiser saying.
And spamming is cheap because spammers sell
stolen facilities: Open relays, hijacked
PC zombies, open proxies, holes in CGI scripts,
etc.
If they were making money they'd have their
own facilities to spam from rather than basing
their entire business on all this criminal
behavior.
Finally, maybe it's because spam DOESN'T work
that it's so virulent? Spammers have to charge
a lousy $100 or so per customer to rope them
in at the chump change price so need hundreds
of customers to survive. And also have enormous
churn as the advertisers find spamming doesn't
work and worse cause them problems from irate
victims so spammers have to keep finding new
customers? That fits the facts also.
The Wall Street Journal should know better than to
publish junk reasoning like this, or at least
consider other possibilities in their article.
Hello, I'm Barry Shein, I run a sizeable ISP, The World,
www.TheWorld.com.
You've probably heard me
speak or write about spam before
(see: http://www.TheWorld.com/~bzs).
Spammers do not sell advertising.
What they sell is crime.
Let me give you an analogy:
Say my name was Tony S. and I said I was in
the waste disposal business.
Now say that you have a small herbal viagra
factory which produces a few drums of toxic
waste daily which need to be properly removed.
You're paying a service $100 per drum. I come
to you and say I'll do it for $20 per drum, an
80% savings.
Cagey person that you are, you realize that's
a very good deal so take it and you're even
smart enough not to ask too many questions.
Every night a coupla oddly well-dressed guys
come by and take your drums away in a different
pick-up, in the morning the now-empty drums are
by your back door, and you pay
your bills. All is right with the world, your
bottom line looks better than ever.
Except for one thing, they're just dumping
the barrels off the side of the highway late
at night when no one is looking.
Are they selling you waste removal services?
Or are they selling you crime?
I contend that without the break-ins, exploitation
of bugs in web scripts,
PC's purposely infected by viruses which let spammers use them to send spam by the tens
of thousands, etc., spammers could not
operate.
Not any more than Tony S could remove drums
for $20 each and dump them legally and stay
in business when everyone else has to charge
$100/drum.
Sure, you could IMAGINE someone underselling
the $100/drum price, or someone spamming
without egregiously breaking any laws.
But I say IT'S IMPOSSIBLE, you can't LEGALLY
send (as someone gave as an example earlier)
200M mail msgs for a gross return of $200 legally,
day after day and stay in business.
You can't afford the bandwidth on that price.
You can't afford the computer power.
You can't afford the lawsuits and other legal problems if
you were so easily identifiable using stable
internet addresses you bought.
You can't afford to
be mobile as your victims block your IPs
relentlessly.
You can't do it. You cannot do it legally.
And if you had to do it legally it'd look
completely different. More like those commercial
messages you get which you think are ok or
tolerable anyhow from Microsoft or Sun or
that magazine you subscribe to, rather than
the immense deluge of filth and crime and
questionable come-ons spam usually represents.
Honest people can't operate like that, or not
for long anyhow.
THEREFORE: Spammers sell crime, not
advertising (or whatever they appear
to be selling.) Just like the factory
owner could dump his own toxic waste
off the side of the highway for even
less than Tony, the person hiring the
spammer is hiring a criminal because for
the relatively low price why take the
chance or learn the tricks of the trade?
As Tony might say: Ya think dese spam guys are
boy scouts or what? Wake up!
The World, http://www.TheWorld.com, the oldest commercial internet dial-up service on the planet* (go ahead, start the usual grousing), offers a $9.89 account and is a local call from the contiguous 48 states in the US (1500+ numbers.)
BUT SOMEHOW PC WORLD'S CRACK REPORTING COULDN'T FIND US!
The $9.89 acct is limited, but for example it gives you squirrelmail which isn't metered, so if you only really need a little dial-up and a good maildrop with web mail it works, and other services (web page etc) can be added a la carte.
Disclaimer: I'm not just the President of The World, I'm also a user.
"It could be a legitimate business," said Barry Shein
This I object to a lot. There's no way I want to support any initiative that puts more spam in my mail box.
How can there be any more spam in your mailbox?
The meter is pegged in the red zone already! Or
is getting there.
My proposal says get rid of those who can't or
won't pay for their freight. So what do you
think the result of that would be? More or less
spam?
I think it's a pretty good guess that you'd end
up with less spam once you get rid of the
dirtbags hoping to make $100 for every million
spams they send out.
The really important point with a "sender pays"
model is that it creates an ECONOMY with which to
control the situation.
The problem right now with every solution I've
seen is that other than perhaps hoping every
end-user on the net installs some technical
solution there's no economy, no money so full-time
people with real skills can go make sure that
a solution actually happens, every day.
I know some will react viscerally at the following
analogy, but imagine an RIAA aimed at spam.
Ok, so RIAA isn't perfect, but maybe that's
because what they're fighting is much harder,
millions of people exchanging music at an individual level. Spam of the more obnoxious
variety shouldn't be so hard. Almost by
definition what we need to stop are the full-time,
professional spammers, the occasional lone wolf
jerk can be dealt with more casually.
But it will take money, and a sender-pays
approach provides that money to widen
enforcement. And that revenue stream makes
it attractive for ISPs and others to cooperate.
It's not just another goody-two-shoes kind of
idea, it's an actual business proposal with, as
they say, a value proposition.
In my scheme you don't start with the hardest
cases. You start with the easiest cases, like
companies who use bulk email whose names and
products you've heard of.
Why would they go along?
Because their message
is being completely drowned out by penis
enlargement and get rich quick ads. And they,
the relatively legitimate "spammers" know it,
even the DMA (Direct Marketing Association) has
come out against "spam" in its more insidious
form (that is, spam from companies that don't
pay them member fees.)
They (the legitimate companies) want
a cover charge at this bar to keep out the
riff-raff. That's what makes advertising valuable,
exclusivity.
What you have to accept is that spam is a social
and economic problem, not a technical problem.
You're not going to solve it with a few more lines
of perl code.
As an ISP I can tell you they're giving up on the internet, to them the cost/benefit is just not worthwhile. That's not a good trend.
This statement seems odd to me - how can you determine that they are leaving the net for good because of spam, or if they are just leaving your service because they found a better/cheaper service to use instead?
We have some idea on this because, as their ISP, we speak to
thousands of customers and read their e-mail.
Not intended as a post but the article links "The World" to http://www.std.com rather than http://www.TheWorld.com not a big deal but it'd probably be more resonant if fixed.
-Barry Shein, World Leader
Re:World's first? Like hell...
on
ISP Chief on Spam
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Barry Shein here,
BS yerself (great initials tho), see RFC2235 for example.
Netcom existed but wasn't offering customers INTERNET access other than hauling their e-mail back and forth to the internet. Big deal, even compuserve did that back then and any number of UUCP providers. Netcom started offering real internet access around April 1990 after they saw we weren't murdered for doing it.
The World started offering the general public real dial-up access to the internet in November 1989, like ftp and telnet and all that (there was no web yet.)
We got a lot of grief for doing it and even got blocked from big chunks of the net for a while. I remember it well, I should publish the flames I got for letting people onto the internet for mere money.
Back then we were just world.std.com (std is for Software Tool & Die, the original company) but now usually go by http://www.theworld.com though the old address works just fine.
Slashdot Mirror
"If everyone hated spam, it would disappear. But like the traditional direct-mail marketers and telemarketers who came before them, spammers survive public outrage, filters, lawsuits and regulations because innumerable times a day, somebody, somewhere responds with money"
This may sound reasonable on the surface but may also be 100% false.
Spammers need money to survive personally which may or may not come from their spamming. Even that is suspect, how many people sink their life savings into going into a business and lose it all?
That said, all spammers really need are advertisers to pay them. Whether anyone ever responds to those ads is a different question.
There's a famous marketing saying: Only half of my advertising works, now if I could just figure out which half!
The point is businesses spend on lots of advertising that returns nothing. But whoever they're paying still makes money, there are no guarantees.
You'd think the marketeers would realize this and stop paying the spammers. But real life is not so simple. Maybe it will eventually start working? Or maybe it's worthwhile because it puts the product name or concept in front of people and they'll buy it through some other means.
It's not like every commercial on TV causes you to immediately run out and buy the product or has any feedback whatsoever as to its effectiveness. Yet billions are spent on getting those TV ads in front of you.
But more importantly, spam is CHEAP. So who cares, "give the trailer trash another $100 to send another 100M messages we're too busy to figure out if it's worth the lousy 100 bucks" you can imagine the advertiser saying.
And spamming is cheap because spammers sell stolen facilities: Open relays, hijacked PC zombies, open proxies, holes in CGI scripts, etc.
If they were making money they'd have their own facilities to spam from rather than basing their entire business on all this criminal behavior.
Finally, maybe it's because spam DOESN'T work that it's so virulent? Spammers have to charge a lousy $100 or so per customer to rope them in at the chump change price so need hundreds of customers to survive. And also have enormous churn as the advertisers find spamming doesn't work and worse cause them problems from irate victims so spammers have to keep finding new customers? That fits the facts also.
The Wall Street Journal should know better than to publish junk reasoning like this, or at least consider other possibilities in their article.
Hello, I'm Barry Shein, I run a sizeable ISP, The World, www.TheWorld.com. You've probably heard me speak or write about spam before (see: http://www.TheWorld.com/~bzs).
Spammers do not sell advertising.
What they sell is crime.
Let me give you an analogy:
Say my name was Tony S. and I said I was in the waste disposal business.
Now say that you have a small herbal viagra factory which produces a few drums of toxic waste daily which need to be properly removed.
You're paying a service $100 per drum. I come to you and say I'll do it for $20 per drum, an 80% savings.
Cagey person that you are, you realize that's a very good deal so take it and you're even smart enough not to ask too many questions.
Every night a coupla oddly well-dressed guys come by and take your drums away in a different pick-up, in the morning the now-empty drums are by your back door, and you pay your bills. All is right with the world, your bottom line looks better than ever.
Except for one thing, they're just dumping the barrels off the side of the highway late at night when no one is looking.
Are they selling you waste removal services?
Or are they selling you crime?
I contend that without the break-ins, exploitation of bugs in web scripts, PC's purposely infected by viruses which let spammers use them to send spam by the tens of thousands, etc., spammers could not operate.
Not any more than Tony S could remove drums for $20 each and dump them legally and stay in business when everyone else has to charge $100/drum.
Sure, you could IMAGINE someone underselling the $100/drum price, or someone spamming without egregiously breaking any laws.
But I say IT'S IMPOSSIBLE, you can't LEGALLY send (as someone gave as an example earlier) 200M mail msgs for a gross return of $200 legally, day after day and stay in business.
You can't afford the bandwidth on that price.
You can't afford the computer power.
You can't afford the lawsuits and other legal problems if you were so easily identifiable using stable internet addresses you bought.
You can't afford to be mobile as your victims block your IPs relentlessly.
You can't do it. You cannot do it legally.
And if you had to do it legally it'd look completely different. More like those commercial messages you get which you think are ok or tolerable anyhow from Microsoft or Sun or that magazine you subscribe to, rather than the immense deluge of filth and crime and questionable come-ons spam usually represents. Honest people can't operate like that, or not for long anyhow.
THEREFORE: Spammers sell crime, not advertising (or whatever they appear to be selling.) Just like the factory owner could dump his own toxic waste off the side of the highway for even less than Tony, the person hiring the spammer is hiring a criminal because for the relatively low price why take the chance or learn the tricks of the trade?
As Tony might say: Ya think dese spam guys are boy scouts or what? Wake up!
not just The World.
president, The World, www.TheWorld.com
The World, http://www.TheWorld.com , the oldest commercial internet dial-up service on the planet* (go ahead, start the usual grousing), offers a $9.89 account and is a local call from the contiguous 48 states in the US (1500+ numbers.)
BUT SOMEHOW PC WORLD'S CRACK REPORTING COULDN'T FIND US!
The $9.89 acct is limited, but for example it gives you squirrelmail which isn't metered, so if you only really need a little dial-up and a good maildrop with web mail it works, and other services (web page etc) can be added a la carte.
Disclaimer: I'm not just the President of The World, I'm also a user.
* Since November 1989, see RFC2235 for example.
"It could be a legitimate business," said Barry Shein
This I object to a lot. There's no way I want to support any initiative that puts more spam in my mail box.
How can there be any more spam in your mailbox? The meter is pegged in the red zone already! Or is getting there.
My proposal says get rid of those who can't or won't pay for their freight. So what do you think the result of that would be? More or less spam?
I think it's a pretty good guess that you'd end up with less spam once you get rid of the dirtbags hoping to make $100 for every million spams they send out.
The really important point with a "sender pays" model is that it creates an ECONOMY with which to control the situation.
The problem right now with every solution I've seen is that other than perhaps hoping every end-user on the net installs some technical solution there's no economy, no money so full-time people with real skills can go make sure that a solution actually happens, every day.
I know some will react viscerally at the following analogy, but imagine an RIAA aimed at spam. Ok, so RIAA isn't perfect, but maybe that's because what they're fighting is much harder, millions of people exchanging music at an individual level. Spam of the more obnoxious variety shouldn't be so hard. Almost by definition what we need to stop are the full-time, professional spammers, the occasional lone wolf jerk can be dealt with more casually.
But it will take money, and a sender-pays approach provides that money to widen enforcement. And that revenue stream makes it attractive for ISPs and others to cooperate. It's not just another goody-two-shoes kind of idea, it's an actual business proposal with, as they say, a value proposition.
In my scheme you don't start with the hardest cases. You start with the easiest cases, like companies who use bulk email whose names and products you've heard of.
Why would they go along?
Because their message is being completely drowned out by penis enlargement and get rich quick ads. And they, the relatively legitimate "spammers" know it, even the DMA (Direct Marketing Association) has come out against "spam" in its more insidious form (that is, spam from companies that don't pay them member fees.)
They (the legitimate companies) want a cover charge at this bar to keep out the riff-raff. That's what makes advertising valuable, exclusivity.
What you have to accept is that spam is a social and economic problem, not a technical problem. You're not going to solve it with a few more lines of perl code.
This statement seems odd to me - how can you determine that they are leaving the net for good because of spam, or if they are just leaving your service because they found a better/cheaper service to use instead?
We have some idea on this because, as their ISP, we speak to thousands of customers and read their e-mail.
Not intended as a post but the article links "The World" to http://www.std.com rather than http://www.TheWorld.com not a big deal but it'd probably be more resonant if fixed.
-Barry Shein, World Leader
Barry Shein here, BS yerself (great initials tho), see RFC2235 for example. Netcom existed but wasn't offering customers INTERNET access other than hauling their e-mail back and forth to the internet. Big deal, even compuserve did that back then and any number of UUCP providers. Netcom started offering real internet access around April 1990 after they saw we weren't murdered for doing it. The World started offering the general public real dial-up access to the internet in November 1989, like ftp and telnet and all that (there was no web yet.) We got a lot of grief for doing it and even got blocked from big chunks of the net for a while. I remember it well, I should publish the flames I got for letting people onto the internet for mere money. Back then we were just world.std.com (std is for Software Tool & Die, the original company) but now usually go by http://www.theworld.com though the old address works just fine.