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Spam Economics

According to a new study:

"After 26 days, and almost 350 million email messages, only 28 sales resulted," says the research paper.

Yet even with this apparently abysmal response rate of less than 0.00001 per cent, the researchers still estimate that the controllers of a network the size of Storm are still bringing in about $7,000 (£4,430) a day or $3.5m (£2.21m) over a year.

I'm sure everybody would love to make an extra $3.5m/yr for doing not much of anything. And we wonder why the spam problem is so pervasive. How much do we spend on anti-spam efforts each year? Does it outweigh the benefits seen by the perpetrators?

Hat tip to Marginal Revolution.

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