

Why Spammers Spam - mrvc
http://nerdr.com/why-spammers-spam/

======
rauljara
"If it was not of value, it would not be profitable and hence, would not
exist."

Thievery, blackmail, extortion, etc. are all profitable, and yet, I would
argue not of value. So is legally tricking people into paying for services
they do not want. This is a terrible sentiment that can be used to justify any
number of shady dealings. But it's also housed in an incoherent paragraph
where the author briefly argues both sides, so I have no idea whether he
actually agrees with the above statement or not.

~~~
mrvc
Playing devil's advocate for a moment, No property or person is being harmed
with spam. Time is wasted, yes. But no crime is being committed in the normal
sense of the word. To compare spam to thievery, blackmail and extortion (where
their is a removal of property of threats to a person) is not a very good
analogy and I think taking things a bit too far. It's closer to aggresively
handing out flyers on the street and possibly a case of harrassment.

~~~
S_A_P
I would disagree. Phishing spam exists in an effort to steal or otherwise harm
the recipients who are tricked into responding. Prescription drug spam can
tempt those who may have a moment of weakness into breaking the law, and they
could possibly purchase counterfeit goods that can directly harm the person.
Money is spent by companies who have to either self maintain or pay a service
to maintain a spam filter. I occasionally miss important emails that are
incorrectly filtered as spam, one was an offer for a side job that would have
paid me real money.

Spam is harmful, plain and simple.

------
maxharris
"As I said above, I don’t have the luxury of ethics at this stage."

Ethics is not a luxury. Properly defined and applied, what is ethical is what
is needed to survive _as a human_ (which means going by reason), _long term_.
This is totally at odds with what spammers do, which is to defraud people,
violate contracts, etc. Running or using a bot network is _trespass and
theft_. In this context, everyone, including the spammer, knows where the
botnet came from.

Yes, this guy might get _some_ money, _for a while_ , just like any other
common criminal can (while constantly worrying about getting caught, long
after the crime was committed). But compare that pathetic psychological state
and the small, ephemeral trickle of income to what someone doing honest work
can earn (a successful startup, for example), and you will see that the
immoral _is_ the impractical.

~~~
eru
In our cushy rich modern societies, there's a lot of room between survival and
ethical behaviour.

~~~
maxharris
If "survival" only means continued metabolism and respiration, yes.

But I submit that "survival" means more than just that. We're _human beings_ ,
so for us, survival requires independent thought, art, science, honesty, self-
esteem, productive work, and a whole lot more.

~~~
eru
I'd call that "independent thought, art, science, honesty, self-esteem,
productive work", and keep the definition of survival close to something like
"You're heart's still beating.".

~~~
maxharris
But the problem with your definition is that if we go by it, human survival in
the long-term is not included.

Your mind's independent thought is ultimately _the thing_ that ensures that
your heart keeps beating. Without it, there will come a point where you can't
keep making the things you need to stay alive physically.

------
duopixel
I get the feeling spamming is often the work of people who can ignore the fact
that some economic activities are harmful or bothersome to the people they are
trying to reach, and to their own brand (beyond the erectile dysfunction
category, which is a whole other league).

I was once acquainted with a company that sent unsolicited mail (travel
related) through one of those gazillion email databases. When I asked why were
they doing it, their response was a blank stare—Well, it gives us a 10 to 1
return on investment each time we do it, why should we stop?.

It's the same reason why it's so difficult to cancel your cable plan,
companies notice that if they ask their customers to fax in their contract,
cancellation rates diminish to a fraction. Profit!

------
MikeKusold
"With all that said and done... (and with this "good" blog now blocked by both
Reddit AND Hacker News) i’m turning to the dark side."

I'm a little confused by that statement. It doesn't seem like it is blocked.

~~~
nbpoole
<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=xnerdr>

It appears his old username is/was.

------
baggins
It must work, because I'd wager that there are more spam blogs/sites than good
blogs/sites. God help you if you try to find legitimate information on health
or insurance.

~~~
Isofarro
The volume of spam blogs compared to non-spam blogs isn't an indicator of
working. The volume is based on two factors:

* Automation at the high-end of spamming * Creating a wide a net as possible to pull in visitors

Much like the volume of spam emails is there because the conversion rate is so
poor, so many emails get filtered. By using volume as a vector, despite the
diminishing returns, spammers aim to get a decent return on their investment.

The marginal cost of email or a new spamblog is low (though email is still by
far cheaper). That's the basis for them being so many of them. I know the
conversion rate for email is miniscule (but multiplying that by millions can
generate a decent sum). No idea about the conversion rate of spam blogs.

The source of income isn't adsense, it's affiliate products, and in those
areas. Porn and pills are the one that are profitable.

And yes, spam blogs do work, they work well enough that when Google finds a
blog farm and drops them out of the index, spammers take some time to figure
out how they got spotted, adjust their approach or make a suitable correction,
and start again. The methods of creating spam sites and blogs differ over
time, but the general approach is still a core spam technique.

------
chrisbennet
Spam is really a theft of someone elses time. Because they only steal a little
time from every victim, spammers may see it as a "small" theft. Shoplifters
use a similar rationalization when stealing from a large store.

My revenge fantasy is to have spammers serve prison time equal to amount of
time they have stolen from their victims i.e. ten seconds a day per victim * 1
million victims sounds about right.

~~~
rick888
Well, you could use the same rational for bad articles on HN...

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KevinMS
Do we really have to be so imprecise in our language that now "spam" in a
headline can refer to "blog spam"? How about "comment spam" as well? What else
is there? How about I write an article titled "spam is now illegal" and by the
fifth paragraph you find out I'm talking about unsolicited faxes? To 99% of
readers out there the last thing they think of when they read "spam" is blog
spam.

------
bane
We wrote a blogpost that touched on some of this as well:
<http://kymalabs.blogspot.com/2011/03/kymalabs-on-spam.html>

------
phektus
What exactly is a spam blog? Is it the same with arbitrage? How does it know
what content to display (as the author says it should be automated)?

~~~
Isofarro
Some spam blogfarms play the arbitrage game with Adsense, but it's more
profitable for them to use GoogleAds to pull traffic in and push visitors
towards their affiliate links.

Content tends to be scraped content, sometimes Markov chained or other
spinning methods. The content to display is based on keywords.

Depending on the spam website solution, the automation is done on a number of
levels (depending on the blogfarm technique):

* WordpressMU with wildcard subdomains based on a spreadsheet of keywords * Automated set up of Blogger blogs (either using Captcha breakers, Mechanical turk, or just asking the user to solve captchas 10 at a time) * Automated publishing of content via XMLRPC (for wordpress and/or blogger), or other interfaces. Then almost always ping-servers are pinged. * Automated creation of websites given a template and a heap of content - sometimes Markoved sometimes spun. Grabbing content either through screen scraping, RSS, text files, anything they can get their hands on. (They tried wikipedia for a while, last time I looked, they were dabbling with Yahoo answers for both content and inbound links) * automated link building. Basically finding fingerprints of known no-rel-follow tools - like Pligg, Wordpress on edu/gov domains etc. Includes automated comment spam to build inbound links.

It does surprise me the lengths the successful spammers go to in blogspam and
spam websites. They figure out this is still more profitable than building
real long-term value and writing interesting content. Sometimes I think it's
one of those "beat Google at it's own game", and the rush of earning quick
money.

------
imjk
It seems karma may have sent him a DDOS attack, as I can't access his site
right now.

------
johnx123
Spamming works and so AirBnB is here

------
Hisoka
Google will punish bad spam blogs eventually. But they're also have a tendency
to punish good blogs accidentally as well. If the probability of being
punished for being good was near zero, I bet there'd be less spammers

