On Wednesday, July 30, 2003, at 09:44 PM, Lee Larson wrote:
> On Wednesday, July 30, 2003, at 07:25 PM, Jerry Yeager opined:
>
>> The thing of it is, if I need to buy something, then I want to see
>> the ads so that I can have a place to begin to make a choice. Until I
>> decide I need to buy something, bleah. So is it a question of taste?
>> For things we want to get, we give implicit permission for the
>> sellers to bombard us with neato ads, for things we don't want, well,
>> don't bug us with any info?
>
> The difference between spam and traditional advertising is that with
> traditional advertising, the seller pays for the advertising. With
> spam, it's the receiver of the advertising that pays. A spammer pays
> about the same to send to 1,000 or 10,000 potential customers. Someone
> receiving spam pays with time and the extra ISP overhead because of
> bigger mail storage and serving needs.
>
The end buyer (in the traditional advertising as you refer to it) also
pays for the advertising, it is a markup add-on that goes into
calculating the retail product price. See a commercial on regular
broadcast tv and buy the product? Part of the money you spend goes to
pay for the commercial (both making it and airing it) that sold you the
product. So really you get to pay twice, once for wasting the time
watching (or listening if you are a radio fan) commercials, then again
when you do buy something. Advertisers don't absorb that cost as just
part of doing business.
> I think the ultimate solution to spam will be some sort of
> micro-payment scheme in which it costs perhaps a fraction of a cent to
> send an e-mail. This will go unnoticed by most of us, but will end up
> costing spammers real money when they start sending a million
> messages. I'm sure the ISPs would like to start collecting 1/100 cent
> for every message sent through their servers.
>
I like the idea as a starting place, but how do you avoid the problem
gateway maintainers holding email hostage until the tax is paid? Who
would be responsible for doing the bookkeeping? Also with the
additional overhead for accounting is a charge of 1/100 cent per
message realistically achievable or would it end up being more like 2
or 3 cents per message? Lastly, this would slow down the small shops
that employ spammers, but how effective would it be against larger
outfits, other than making them insist that spammers are more careful
at verifying email address before the junk is sent.
Jerry
>
>
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>
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