I don't usually open it. Sometimes, though, I'm sufficiently entertained by the prosaic gobbledygook visible in the preview pane (e.g., "It relents unfurled, so much the stovepipe bends hollowly"; actually I made that one up myself) to open spam messages and see what's being offered.
Today I was directed to this "male enhancement" site (the imagery here is not work-friendly, but if you're surfing the Refuge you likely don't care). What I find interesting about MegaDik is its manufacturers' 180-degree departure from the strategy used by the makers of ExtenZe, who refuse to even explicitly identify what part of the anatomy ExtenZe is supposed to "enhance" -- at least on their TV commericals. (Yeah, I stay up late.) Their Web site is not so demure.
I'd really like to know how many of these inert phallotropics are sold every year in the U.S. and how much total revenue their sales generate for the scammers that make them. It doesn't take a physiology genius to know that the claims made on behalf of "male enhancement" products are utter bullshit, but a good many people must be buying this junk-for-junk or else the ads for such balorkey presumably wouldn't be so bountiful. (This was dealt with as a side issue in Spam Kings, an enjoyable treatise by Brian McWilliams that follows people on both sides of the UCE war; no numbers were given, as I recall, but I was led to understand that a lot more people buy pecker pills than most of us think.)
Additional factors not germane to snail-mail or traditional media advertising: There's very little overhead involved in a spam operation, and anonymity and untraceability are obviously much easier to maintain when you're spamming as opposed to buying time on the airwaves or in print publications.
Comments
I've done direct mail for a manufacturing concern. They mailed out postcards, catalogs, etc. at various times of the year.
I can tell you that it's hideously expensive to do so and the rate of new business gained from the mailings is 3 to 4 percent.
With spam it's so much easier. You'll still get 3 to 4 percent because an idiot is an idiot and lots of guys are really uptight about the size of their penis. Little do they know, the average is the average for a reason.
Anyhow spam can blast messages to millions. Lets take that as an example. Lets say your little product costs you $1.75 a bottle but you sell it to the mark for $15.99. We'll generously give a 3.5 percent share from that million so it adds up to $559,650. Your profit is $498,400 before expenses for the spamming, etc.
Not a bad deal for you at all. And much spam is generated by generally upstanding corporations. You read that right, just follow the money trail.
Posted by: Tony P | July 2, 2007 9:05 PM
Kevin, you guys have some funky formating going on with the title in the post before this.
Posted by: Rev. BigDumbChimp | July 2, 2007 10:36 PM
Hey, so that's what happened to the image link I swore I'd pasted into the post!
Movable Type has a habit of whimsically repositioning the cursor from the entry body to the title field. This is only one of many annoying, but not crippling, aspects of the software. I think we're upgrading shortly.
Posted by: Kevin Beck | July 2, 2007 10:43 PM