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What is the point of Spamming? Surely it's a waste of time...

by Noel Cunningham
4 replies
So I've been getting my fair share of SPAM lately and it's starting to p*ss me off a little...

My email has obviously been picked up by a scraper because the amount of unsolicated offers I've been getting lately has been unreal. Getting a lot of auto-responder junk so I guess the list owners are just scraping the web, adding the addresses to a single optin AR series and then letting their follow-ups hit me offer after offer...

The other thing I've been noticing is that I'm getting a shed load of spam comment on my blogs. Now I don't really have a big problem with this per se, cos all I have to do is highlight them all and click delete...

But both of these cases have me wondering? Are these spammers just the dumbest guys on the planet or what?

I mean the amount of spam complaints their AR accounts get must be off the chart and surely the auto-blog comment crap is worthless since they just get deleted when the blog owner moderates the comments...

So what is the point of it all? Ok, I'm sure they get the odd person to buy their magical ebook or approve their blog comment but is it really worth it?

With all the effort they put into these blackhat methods if they applied themselves in the right way and worked on a real business model I'm sure a lot of these guys would make a lot more money than they do now...

I dunno - may be it's just me but I don't see the logic in it at all

Maybe I'm missing out on some secret that I've yet to discover about all this... Anyway I think I'll end my rant there and leave you guys alone

Cheers - Noel.
#point #spamming #surely #time #waste
  • Profile picture of the author mosthost
    It's a numbers game. They profit based on a TINY conversion rate from a MASSIVE amount of emails.
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  • Profile picture of the author cashtree
    Sadly spammers are making a LOT of money that's why the continue to do it. Really, spam is poor mans marketing, it's no different than a big companies paying millions to google to have their ad shown everywhere via adsense, other than googles not getting millions...as mosthost said, it's a numbers games, those who are successful have scaled things up one way or another.
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  • Profile picture of the author OldLodgeSkins
    I'll add a couple of things to what has already been said:

    • You don't need to use a regular AR to have a list - and possibly use it to send spam. I don't (either use a regular AR or send spam :p). I've got a newsletter system built into my website. So can others. At some point the domain may get blacklisted, they'll just get another domain...
    • You seem to be assuming (I could be wrong here) that there are people actually sending that spam, and posting comments on your blog... Most of the time, there isn't. I mean, there's someone responsible for it obviously, but the job is actually done by bots. So it's not that much of an effort really... Having a captcha helps keeping them at bay but it's not a perfect solution, there are captcha solving services nowadays. That's why I also have what I call a "bot trap" on my two websites, a hidden field in each form, normal visitors don't see it so they don't fill it, but bots do see it and therefore fill it, which identifies them... If it's filled the comment is rejected.
    Seb.
    Signature
    Do you use Facebook ? Then you can make money just by inviting people to a Facebook group ! It's called the Instant Income System. How cool is that?
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  • Profile picture of the author Daniel Thompson
    Originally Posted by Noel Cunningham View Post


    But both of these cases have me wondering? Are these spammers just the dumbest guys on the planet or what?

    I mean the amount of spam complaints their AR accounts get must be off the chart and surely the auto-blog comment crap is worthless since they just get deleted when the blog owner moderates the comments...

    So what is the point of it all? Ok, I'm sure they get the odd person to buy their magical ebook or approve their blog comment but is it really worth it?
    It definitely seems crazy that there is a huge criminal enterprise set up to spam email accounts indiscriminately, when mailing to preselected/interested customers is such a proven business model.

    But, then again, think about the intelligence quotient of the total set of those who get emails. Approximately 95% of the population scores within two Standard Deviations of the mean, i.e. has an IQ between 70 and 130. Wikipedia--

    Half of all the people you meet in public today likely have lower than a 100 IQ. And most of them have email.

    And even many of 100+ IQ, are those who are very lonely, depressed, and are emotionally susceptible to an unrequested missive via email. I had a cousin who kept getting spam emails from money transfer scam artists. He answered at least 7 of them (I received his computer upon his death with all of his correspondence to and fro recorded- ) and actually went to the bank twice based on these officious emails.

    Wired Magazine has a great article about the real ongoing profits of spammers, and why they aren't going to be wiped out very soon. Its title is--Equation: How Much Money Do Spammers Rake In?

    Very illuminating. It still seems illogical to me why someone would spam, but then it seems equally illogical that someone would willingly take drugs, steal for living or want to become President.


    Daniel Thompson
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