I’ve often asked myself, “how do enough people possibly click on this awful piece of spam to make it profitable?” Apparently, “enough people” is an incredibly small number.
According to a new study, only 1 in 12.5 million pieces of spam draws a response, but that alone is enough for a spam network called Storm to generate more than $2 million in annual revenue.
To come up with those numbers, a team from several institutions in the University of California system hijacked Storm and setup fake spam campaigns to measure the response rate. According to the BBC, they took control of more than 75,000 machines, and then extrapolated out the data to the full size of Storm’s network to arrive at the final numbers. In case you’re counting, 1 in 12.5 million in a response rate of 0.000001%.
So how is that possibly profitable? Since the spammers behind Storm don’t actually send the malicious email from their own servers and instead use a vast network of distributed PCs that they’ve infected, the costs are basically nil. And the end products that they are selling – usually prescription drugs – pay huge referral fees.
Essentially, this study means that spam isn’t going away any time soon, despite the seemingly horrid numbers behind it. It’s also one of the more recession proof online businesses you can find – people need their V1AGR@ no matter how dire the economic conditions.