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