Crash Culligan's Journal: How Not to Get the Point

"Reformed spammer says he may relapse"

In response, I have only one word: "WTF??" And in the words of AdBusters, "how much damage must a company do before we question its right to exist?"

Summary of article: a man, who has taken legitimate pains to spam responsibly and comply with all legislation like CAN-SPAM, confesses that he may have to turn back to illegally spamming and trying to defeat filters if service providers don't stop blocking his messages.

Prize quote of the piece:

"When I'm forced into a situation where I cannot do legal business because other people are interfering with it, I will go back to spam," he told Reuters after the hearing.

Okay, one more time, all businesses consist of three distinct parts: a buyer, a seller, and a product or service. In that context, let's take a hard, careful look at the average spammer's business model:

The Buyer: The person who wants to find buyers for a particular product or service of their own.
The Seller: The spammer^Wadvertiser.
The Product: Here's where things get ugly: the product is the general public, who the Seller tries to drive to the Buyer by whatever means necessary.

The problem with this business model is that 99% of the populace (and that's a conservative estimate) aren't interested in the products the Buyer is trying to hawk. They especially aren't interested in being the product of someone else.

And the thing which so many people don't realize is that most advertising works by this exact same model: the advertiser promises the buyer exposure, and what this means is that the advertiser will do whatever it takes, up to and including sucking up bandwidth and polluting the environment, to get the buyer's name recognized by the general populace.

If advertising doesn't seem to work, it's because people mentally tune advertising out to avoid the onslaught of half-hearted glad-handing condescending and sometimes infantile attempts to sell other peoples' crap. Putting it more in their faces may give people urges, but it won't be to buy stuff -- more likely to pummel the living fertilizer out of the seller.

Internet service providers realize this because they depend heavily on customer satisfaction, which goes down if they get bombarded by advertising. And trust me, nothing but nothing pisses off a customer like downloading 60 junk mails over a dial-up connection.

I think the spammers try not to realize this because, if they did, they'd have to get honest work.

Comments? (They're turned on and everything this time!)