Email spam has plagued all of us for some time now, but we\u2019re helpless to do much about it. We instinctively know that it has some kind of impact on us, either economically or otherwise; but we try not to spend too much time thinking about the implications. Why? Because spam sucks, short and simple. To give spam any more thought than the time it takes to drag an email to the trash would feel like giving in, like we\u2019re being defeated by the filthy stuff.<\/p>\n

But then we\u2019re constantly plagued with studies, research papers and articles that go out of their way to tell us just how much spam we\u2019re dealing with. It seems that you can\u2019t blink these days without finding yet another diatribe on the impact of spam. So we tune out the noise, especially those articles that use made-up numbers like \u2018bajillion\u2019 and \u2018gazillion\u2019 to express just how devastating spam is on our connected lives.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, we do have to listen, though, especially when two researchers who used to work for Yahoo! publish a paper on the economic realities of spam. Why? The trite answer is that it\u2019s interesting stuff, but more importantly, it\u2019s our job to understand what the spam influx is costing us, our companies, and society as a whole. If these two researchers are correct, then their paper is an eye-opening perspective on the social disease known as email spam.<\/p>\n

Justin M. Rao, a Research Scientist at Microsoft in New York, and David H. Reiley is a Research Scientist working for Google in Mountain View, California, and together they completed their article \u201cThe Economics of Spam\u201d while working as researchers for Yahoo! in Santa Clara, California. Their article was published in July\u2019s issue<\/a> of the Journal of Economic Perspectives<\/em>, and the co-authors waste no time pinning a number on spam\u2019s ugly head, putting their estimate on the financial impact of spam to American firms and consumers at a whopping $20 billon.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur figure is more conservative than the $50 billion figure often cited by other authors,\u201d Rao and Reiley state, \u201cand we also note that the figure would be much higher if it were not for private investment in anti-spam technology by firms.\u201d The two also hail the work of some \u201ccrafty computer scientists who have infiltrated and monitored spammers\u2019 activity,\u201d and estimate that \u201cspammers and spam-advertised merchants collect gross worldwide revenues on the order of $200 million per year.\u201d<\/p>\n

Seriously? $200 million? Maybe we need to start sending the spammers emails asking them to help us get money out of the country. Look, these numbers are estimates, but they\u2019re estimates based on a bevy of research and evidence. And they have a disturbing ring of truth.<\/p>\n

Rao and Reiley point out that almost all spam is illegal under current laws, and that for years there has been a \u201cstrategic cat-and-mouse game between spammers and email providers.\u201d They also examine how the \u201cmarket structure for spamming has evolved from a diffuse network of independent spammers running their own online stores to  a highly specialized industry featuring a well-organized network of merchants,  spam distributors (botnets), and spammers (or \u201cadvertisers\u201d).\u201d In short, spam is not only a business, but it\u2019s big business.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s in a number?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

So how did the researchers arrive at $20 billion, a number greater than the GDP of more than a hundred countries ranging from Equatorial Guinea to Niue? To begin with, Rao and Reiley included the wasted time that users spent dealing with junk email, as well as the cost of missing important messages that were flagged false positives.<\/p>\n

They also included the cost of server hardware, which \u201crequires more than five times as much capacity as would be required in the absence of spam,\u201d as well as the cost of spam prevention services \u201cprovided by firms to reduce the burden on end users.\u201d They admit that the \u2018social cost,\u2019 tallying the number of hours lost dealing with email spam, was a challenge, and that they examined \u201csuccess rates of spam in influencing consumer behavior, and [used] these to infer how many spam messages must have gotten through.\u201d<\/p>\n

All in all, it\u2019s a great read, and brings to light issues that you might not have considered, as well as issues that one might have inferred and which are now backed with some bona fide research. Perhaps the most impactful takeaway is the numbers themselves, which seem to indicate that we\u2019re getting nowhere in the fight to end the financial impacts of spam.<\/p>\n

Finally, at a worth of $20 billion, if it waits a few weeks, spam will be able to buy Facebook<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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