Facscinating paper: Spamalytics: An Emperical Analysis of Spam Marketing Conversion

Rob — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 04:02:29 +0000

Thanks to High Scalability for publicizing a very cool paper on Spamalytics.

The paper Spamalytics: An Empirical Analysis of Spam Marketing Conversion is a fascinating (academic) read about spam conversion. I’ve always assumed that spamming must be profitable at least for the anti-spam industry. This paper not only outlines the underlying economics but the Storm Netbot spam system as well. In fact these guys actually hacked the spam system to carry out their experiments.

Highlights:

It took 12.5 million emails to generate 1 sale
After 26 days the botnet had sent out over 350 million emails and 28 generate a transaction
Extrapolating the figures, they believe the network generated $3.5 million a year in revenue
Researchers gained control of 75,869 hijacked computers
One in 10 people clicked on links that normally download malware to turn their computer into a bot
Between 3500 and 8500 bots are created daily

Andrew Chen’s Renewable Online Audiences

Rob — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 23:34:26 +0000

Here is a presentation that Andrew Chen delivered at OATV that I’ve found very relevant. The presentation talks to the need for websites to grow a core audience that returns and returns again. Organizations that are chasing or counting on spikes in traffic for success are ultimately chasing ‘Fools Gold.’ In short, you can’t build your business on highly variable traffic. This certainly emphasizes the need to learn ‘what happened’ (Quantitative) but the ‘Why’ (Qualitative) as well.

Growing Renewable Audiences (presented at OATV)

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

Rob Grady » Analytics

Facscinating paper: Spamalytics: An Emperical Analysis of Spam Marketing Conversion

Andrew Chen’s Renewable Online Audiences