In a message written on Sat, May 04, 2002 at 04:36:40PM -0400, Scott A Crosby wrote:
So far, other than Jared Mauch <jared@puck.Nether.net>'s calculation where he neither confirmed nor disputed $.02/email, I've yet to see *one* quantified per-message price bandied about..
It doesn't matter. I will suggest that as long as the cost of e-mail advertisements is cheaper than the cost of snail mail advertisements you will get more e-mail advertisements than snail mail ones. Even at $0.18/message (or whatever the bulk rate is these days), plus the cost of paper, printers, machines/people to stuff envelops I still get 2-3 unwanted physical ads in my snail mail box every day. Even if spammers had to pay $0.05, $0.02, $0.0002, or whatever the cost is determined to be you will get spam. Lots of spam. In fact, if the spammers did have to pay it would eliminate the 'theft of resources' argument, and I bet spam would triple as more business consider it a legal and ethical way of doing business. Sadly, I don't see the virtual world working any better than the real world. The only real difference at the moment is the type of products being sold. In the end there will be a mechanism to make spam legal. It may be micro-payments, it may be something else; but business will find a way to do it. Then your spam will change from "Viagra" and "Live xxxx Girls" to "Get your Capitol 1 No Hassel Card" and "Publishers Clearinghouse wants to award you $1 Million!" Maybe that wouldn't be so bad, the spam would be less offensive. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/ Read TMBG List - tmbg-list-request@tmbg.org, www.tmbg.org