Pay Per Spam?
Spam. It’s the dirty word of the online world and one of the backbones of the adult Internet industry. It’s something that everyone would like to do without in their email inboxes. It is like a bad smell that seems to infiltrate even the most filtered email account. This morning I had about twenty new spams in my inbox, and out of those twenty; about sixteen of them were from porn sites. I get frustrated because if I turn up the spam filter on my email, then I end up not receiving important emails that are from people who may not in my contact list. If I leave my filter as is, then I become inundated with spam that will offer anything from the Paris Hilton videotape to pills that will make my penis bigger (even though I do not have one). It shames me a little that I am involved in an industry in which many of its members rely heavily on massive spam campaigns to get their product or service out there. While it may still bring in the traffic, it is a dirty means in which to obtain that extra bit of revenue. Email inboxes across the globe would breathe a sigh of relief if only we could be rid of spam entirely. Well, it seems that Bill Gates and Microsoft are going to try to come to the rescue of our inboxes.
It looks like the big guns at Microsoft have been putting their heads together to try to come up with feasible ways to reduce and/or get rid of spam completely. At the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft Corp., told participants, “Two years from now, spam will be solved”. That is a very big statement to make considering the timeline that he gives, as well as the greatness of the task of ridding the world of spam once and for all. It is an interesting statement, but I really feel that we should take such proclamations with a grain of salt.
Apparently, Microsoft has been working on various methods of proving the identity of the sender of an email. One of the methods that they have come up with is to have the sender of the email, solve a puzzle that only a person and not a computer, could solve. They would have to solve this puzzle in order to send their email. Another method would be to have the sender solve a computational puzzle, which would be easy if someone were sending a few emails, but would be costly and time-consuming for mass emails. The last and most promising method, according to Microsoft, would be to have a monetary charge put on spam. While he did not divulge the exact details of this proposed method, Gates did outline the thinking behind this particular approach to ridding the world of spam.
The proposed monetary method would see people assessing their level of risk for receiving email from strangers, and they would then turn that risk into a monetary value. If the email turned out to be important or something that the recipient was expecting, then there would be no charge, but if the email was in fact spam from an unknown party, then that spammer would have to cough up the monetary risk value. For instance, let’s say that I assess my risk level as being high, therefore I place a value of $0.05 on every incoming unwanted email. If after doing this, I receive a spam email from an adult site, then I could force the site to cough up the five cents. However, if I receive an email from an old high school friend who is not in my contact list, then I could waive the monetary charge. This method of reducing spam seems like it may have a little merit to it, but to actually implement something like this would be a huge project and would definitely take some time. I am not sure if two years is a feasible timeline, but I guess they are Microsoft and they can basically do anything that they want.
How would something like this affect adult Webmasters that rely heavily on mass email campaigns as part of their revenue? Well, if this spam removal tactic were actually implemented, then many adult Webmasters would be hit pretty hard, just where it counts: in the pocketbook. For many Webmasters, the cost of sending out the emails would be greater than the profit received from the incoming traffic. Let’s just say that an Adult webmaster had a list of one hundred thousand email addresses. If the average monetary risk value assigned by the recipients is three cents for an unwanted email, then to send out emails to that list would cost the webmaster approximately three thousand dollars. That is quite a bit of money to put up before finding out how much traffic the spam campaign would actually bring in.
For all you spammers who are reading this and starting to feel uneasy, I would not start panicking just yet. This type of solution to get rid of spam is still a ways off, and there is still a chance that we may never see it at all. However, if I could give one last word of advice to all spammers out there, it would be to start thinking of other means to bring in traffic and revenue, just in case these ideas become a reality sooner than we think.
Reader Comments: (1 posts)
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Hollie says: I never thought I would find such an evredyay topic so enthralling! |
December 10th, 2011 at 12:39pm EST Rating:  |
