The spam economy

What does spam really cost U.S. businesses? Trying to pin down the answer, the New York Times finds that it all depends on which research company you ask. Estimates range from $49 per employee every year (The Radicati Group) to $1,400 per employee (Osterman Research) per year.

Spammers these days pay as little as 0.025 cent to send an e-mail message. The computing costs for the recipients, or their Internet providers, to process each message are similarly tiny. But with billions of spam messages sent each day, all these fractions of cents start to add up to real money.

(Note: If you don't like registration, you can also read the full text here, but you'll miss out on a handy chart.)

On the flip side, however, the Times points out that spam has also become a growing driver of high-tech spending:

• ISPs, universities, and businesses that get or send lots of e-mail need to hire people who focus on dealing with spam.
• Organizations are buying new equipment, developing new software and boosting network capacity to better cope with spam. Spam is actually "fostering the growth of the e-mail infrastructure," Wharton marketing professor Peter S. Fader says.

Spam has also spurred the creation of new businesses dedicated to eradicating it. Companies like Brightmail are, fundamentally, trying to change the economics of spamming so that it becomes less lucrative, and less tempting, Creative Loafing recently noted:

For instance ... the cost of sending out 1 million e-mails is approximately $200, for which a spammer might earn $500 in commissions -- a profit of $300. But if a spammer is forced to send out 2 million e-mails in order to make the same $500, eventually he'll go into a different line of work -- or, better yet, starve.