I just read last week’s NYT article about the “Iraq’s Most Wanted” playing cards. Fascinating. GreatUSAFlags.com has apparently sold 1.5 million decks of these cards, and from the tone of the article, it sounds like spam is mostly to blame. It starts with Zac Brandenberg sending two million emails with one click. “[He] had no idea the kind of success he would achieve.” He thought he was just going to annoy two million people.

The “success” was the result of (1) an in-demand product, and (2) spam marketing. A hierarchy of affiliate programs encouraged spammers to send out the messages. Each affiliate gets paid by the sale, but has virtually no costs when marketing by email. Thus spam is encouraged. (I’m not bashing affiliate marketing. When used responsibly it’s a great innovation.) If people didn’t respond to spam email, it would probably stop. Despite the extremely low conversion rate (purchases divided by messages), the cost is so low that profitability is easy.

The truth of the matter, however, is that spam is not cheap. It might not cost the spammer much, but what about the costs that are shifted to the recipients? What about the internet resources used? The recipients time in deleting messages?

Lets assume it takes one second to identify and delete a spam email. This guy sent two million messages, at a temporal cost of two million seconds. That’s roughly 555 hours: over 23 full days. If these emails were opened during work hours, and the average salary was $40k for a 40 hour work week (just a hypothetical), it would have cost the recipients (not the sender) over $10,000! “On the best days, the cards generated commissions of $5,000 to $6,000 for every one million e-mail messages sent.” (note – this calculation was done with the Microsoft calculator, so if I got it wrong that’s probably why).