underachievers
I have been sending and receiving email for a decade, and during that time I've deleted a lot of spam. I've never been particularly annoyed by spam - before I signed up for Gmail (which is unmatched when it comes to intercepting spam before I see it) I would just delete the messages and move on with my life. I didn't receive that much to begin with, so I was never able to sympathize with people who claimed to have thousands upon thousands of spam messages clouding their inboxes.
Still, I was not completely apathetic about spam; while I may not be as inconvenienced as some by their mere presence, I have always been disappointed in the quality of spam messages. In the early-to-mid nineties, I shrugged off the obvious subject lines, the poor English, and the ridiculous formatting because I figured that the people creating the messages were amateurs who were experimenting and didn't have any experience to tell them what would work and what wouldn't. They were true spammers: throwing millions of messages into the wind in the hopes of making profits in volume.
What's disappointing is that today, ten years later, most of the spam that I see in my Gmail spam folder is no different. I don't understand how such a lucrative business could still depend on such amateur content. I realize that the messages will always be a little zany because of the never-ending battle between spammers and spam blockers, but I don't think that should preclude the spammers from sending advertisements with proper English sentences and appropriate color schemes.
Every time I read a news article about the arrest or trial of a spam kingpin[1], they always mention how large the spam market is and the potential for huge profits; I find it hard to believe that the successful people in this business are not interested in creating higher-quality, more professional advertisements. I'm not saying they need to create corporate-level advertisements, but they should be willing to spend thirty minutes or so on a message to make sure it's legible and credible. Thirty minutes seems like a small price to pay for a significant increase in one's click-through rate.
The only really creative spam I've ever seen arrived around the spring of 2006. All of a sudden I started seeing emails from senders such as Felix Q. Marvelous and Burger F. Luscious, with subjects that, while not valid English, were at least entertaining[2]. Sadly, the message content was the same old boring stuff... but I shared a lot of laughs with my friends by exchanging great spam names. If the authors of this genre of spam had just applied the same creativity to the actual content, they might have convinced someone to take their emails seriously, but instead, they never evolved beyond an amusing self-parody. As of today, the spammers are back to their Plain Jane, WE ARE READY TO ACCEPT YOUR LOAN REQUEST ways.
Only one group of people disappoints me more than spammers, and that's scam artists. People who are trying to scam other people into giving up their bank account number or other important data have the opportunity to make more in one hit than spammers do in a year. And yet, it wasn't until late 2005 or early 2006 that they thought to replace their poorly-formatted messages with HTML and images copied from real bank web sites. Hello? The media is always going on and on about how clever these online scams are, but I see them as incredibly inept. Yes, they stole one old lady's life savings and her home is in foreclosure, but how many people did they lose because they misspelled Citibank? Twice? That's beyond lazy.
Sometimes I feel like I should have gone into the spam business. The amount of wasted potential I've seen over the last decade tells me that someone with my ambition could really clean up. With a few college classes on psychology, advertising, and information technology, the will to work for more than five minutes on an advertisement, and the email automation software that has existed for years, I bet I could double the average click-through rate and make a killing.
Sigh. I could have been a kingpin.
[1] Always kingpin. Not executive. Not owner. Kingpin. Like he's gunning people down and sneaking cocaine through customs instead of clicking a few buttons from a non-descript apartment in Poughkeepsie.
[2] A little too entertaining to reproduce here.
Labels: culture, narcissism
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