1 sale every 12,500,000 pitches
Posted: Friday 14 Nov 2008, under category Talking Points
Can a business exist which converts only 0.00001 percent of its potential customers into actual customers? Indeed this seems to be the case of one the most notoriously hated of businesses: spammers. A study conducted by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley have determined that spammers receive about 1 response for every 12,500,000 e-mails sent.
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 am sure you, like myself, while deleting spam from your inbox have sometimes briefly wondered who, if anyone, actually responds to this stuff. I am not surprised at how few people do indeed answer, but I am a bit unpleasantly surprised at how much revenue spammers get despite such a low response rate. Still, I can't help but find the phenomenon of spam kind of intriguing. Even with absolutely no regard to how vile and annoying they are to virtually every single e-mail user, they still manage to take in 3.5 million a year. How depressing.
