Microsoft’s Justin Rao and Google’s David Reiley worked together to determine the societal cost of spam compared with the benefits spammers receive. Their findings: Spam brings in $200 million and society pays $20 billion.
Even though spammers are earning relatively small amounts compared to the societal cost, it still proliferates because the cost to send spam is so small. Rao and Reiley’s report found that for spam to be worthwhile, it only needs 1 in 25,000 people to buy something through its advertising.
Rao and Reiley also offer a solution: raise the cost of business for spammers.
“We advocate supplementing current technological anti-spam efforts with lower-level economic interventions at key choke points in the spam supply chain, such as legal intervention in payment processing or even spam-the-spammers tactics,” the report states.
“By raising spam merchants’ operating costs,” adds the report, “such countermeasures could cause many campaigns no longer to be profitable at the current marginal price of $20-50 per million emails.”
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