by: Karl Long
We always knew that someone had to be clicking on penis enlargement emails and not only that, someone had to actually be buying that crap. It’s kind like late at night when you’re watching horrible infomercials that you think to yourself who the hell is buying this crap, well enough people to make it economically viable to make those repugnant commercials.
Well some CS students at Berkley have released the first empirical study of spam conversion rates called Spamalytics: An Empirical Analysis of Spam Marketing Conversion and the best part is they did it through hacking the Storm botnet itself and studied the results from 469 Million spam messages.
By infiltrating its command and control infrastructure parasitically, we convinced it to modify a subset of the spam it already sends, thereby directing any interested recipients to servers under our control, rather than those belonging to the spammer.
We have documented three spam campaigns comprising over 469 million e-mails. We identified how much of this spam is successfully delivered, how much is filtered by popular anti-spam solutions, and, most importantly, how many users “click-through” to the site being advertised (response rate) and how many of those progress to a “sale” or “infection”sion rate).
Genius, download the PDF here
Thanks Sweis on friendfeed
Original Post: http://experiencecurve.com/archives/think-your-conversion-rates-are-bad-new-study-reveals-spam-converstion-rate
