No -- don't do it. People hate spammers. But, you can now rest easy knowing that scientists from two top universities have shown what you already know -- spamming can be profitable. I do not know what the study cost or if they took money from the government. Yet, we have a conclusion. The analysis suggests that even with a tiny response rate, a big spam operation can turn over millions of dollars in profits every year.
Scientists from University of California, Berkeley and UC, San Diego (UCSD) determined that even with an incredibly small response rate -- spamming can be quite profitable. As if you didn't guess that. What you may not know is that it is profitable if you get just one click for every 12.5-million emails.
How did they measure it? Over seven months, the researchers sent 469-million email messages using a zombie network of 75,869 hijacked home computers as relays for junk mail. (BBC)
"The best way to measure spam is to be a spammer," wrote the researchers in a paper describing their work.
Two types of fake spam campaign were run through these machines. One mimicked the way viruses spread and the other tried to tempt people to visit a fake pharmacy site and buy a herbal remedy to boost their libido. (The fake pharmacy site always returned an error message when potential buyers clicked a button to submit their credit card details.)
"After 26 days, and almost 350 million e-mail messages, only 28 sales resulted," wrote the researchers. The response rate for this campaign was less than 0.00001%. This is far below the average of 2.15% reported by legitimate direct mail organizations.
"Taken together, these conversions would have resulted in revenues of $2,731.88—a bit over $100 a day for the measurement period," said the researchers.
Scaling this up a full-sized zombie network, the researchers estimate that the controllers of the vast system are netting about $7,000 a day or more than $2-million per year.
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