Spam Success Rate: 29%

What’s the biggest problem with spam? It’s not that people get away with it and profit from it; it’s that an ungodly number of recipients actually open them up and act on the offers they see in those spam messages.

Self-proclaimed “Leader in Internet & Content Security” company Marshal says that 29% of Web users have made a purchase by way of a spam message they received.

If that number seems ridiculously high to you, you’re not alone. Granted, any time a firm who deals with battling spam, malware, and other enemies of the Internet, releases their findings on a matter related to their line of business, a grain of salt is in order. At the very least however, there seems to be a solid grain of truth to the claim that an unexpectedly large number of Internet users are actually making purchases through spam.

Marshal notes that in a 2004 poll, Forrester Research found that 20% of 6,000 active, Web-using respondents indicated that they made purchases through spam messages. This seems to lend a bit more credence to the company’s more recent claims.

Still, 29% seems suspiciously high. The survey conducted by Marshall polled a relatively paltry 622 respondents, which makes the 29% response rate a bit harder to swallow.

Bradley Anstis, Vice-President of Products at Marshal, has an explanation for the surprisingly high number.

“Spam is commonly believed to attract very low response rates. Estimates indicate there is often less than ten purchases made for every million spam messages sent. But most of these messages are blocked by spam filters. This means the actual response rates are much higher if you only count those emails that make it into a person’s inbox.”

No one can argue against the claim that spam is growing in number and in its problematic influence, as it continues to eat away bandwidth and waste immense amounts of time and money. It appears, however, that so long as spammers are able to reel in enough fish from their sea of lists, spam will continue to grow in annoyance.

E-mail users have no one to blame but themselves.

Sources:

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2008/08/21/youre-getting-spam-because-others-are-buying

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/29_of_internet_users_have_boug.php

http://www.marshal.com/pages/newsitem.asp?article=748&thesection=news