18 million email addresses ... what would you do?

organically? As in "opt in" or as in "scraped"??? Should I guess?

There is no way of knowing the stats exactly, but it's been estimated that the average person gets a new email every 5 months.

What would I do?

Delete the list off my computer and begin building a list around a single niche topic by offering great value. I would then nurture the list and build the prospects desire to hear from me. It's how great businesses are built.

Forget making money from 18 million names. Better yet, think of it as 18 million people you are soon going to alienate and offend.

Steve

First post and he is asking how to monetize 18 MILLION emails.

This guy is up to no good.

That description plus your 8-10 year time frame narrows it down to ChipIn and Pledgie. But ChipIn went offline in 2013, leaving Pledgie.

What's my grand prize?

Flowspark,

There are several points that some of us who have been in IM for a long time are trying to help you with - but you're not listening.

It's why we're here on the forum and trying to assist when people post threads like yours. You're asking for suggestions and we're trying to give you our best thoughts on those questions you have.

1- "Old and cold" leads (email addresses) are almost never responsive to offers, especially if they are not highly targeted to that offer.

2- Scraped leads are not only not responsive, but they will turn many prospects and hosting providers against you at the peril of your business reputation and your email accounts.

3- A large list like yours is never targeted to one market. By that, I mean that there were probably many, many different incentives for opt-in and those incentives are not the same. That matters because you have a large list of prospects that all expect different things. Your list can't be homogeneous (in terms of when they opted in, what they are looking for, what their incentive was to join, etc.) Trying to market to folks with widely varied interests rarely does anything but waste your advertising dollars.

4- It is very easy to buy huge lists of email addresses online but extremely difficult to build the same size and legitimate opt-in lists. Typically, the difference is these million + lists of email addresses are scraped from the Internet without regard for market interest and then sold over and over again to unsuspecting and naive folks who think they will make money off them. "If only one in 10,000 buys my offer I will be a millionaire!" Experienced marketers will tell you it just never works like that.

5- I am pretty confident I could go online right now, find a bunch of email lists for sale (3M here, 5M there, etc), purchase them for a couple of hundred dollars and have a larger "list" than you have. So why don't I do that? Exactly for the reasons mentioned above.

You're telling posters to be "positive" . . . and what you're really saying is "tell me what I want to hear." Tell me how to make money with this list.

In reality, what you do with the list is your business. You asked for suggestions and we are trying to help you steer clear of, at best, a huge waste of time and resources . . . and, at worst, a plan that will hurt your reputation, turn a lot of people against you, and get you in hot water with your account servicers.

Good luck to you,

Steve

Well that is super positive of you.

clean the data and have it verified first. if the oldest partial is 10years old.
i wouldnt be surprised if those 18 million addresses get chopped down to about 3 million or so names at that point its a little more manageable and you genuinely have more options, but until you do that first there is no real point going on to talk about the rest of it