How Viagra spam works

This appeared on Stuart Brown’s Modern Life Is Rubbish a month or two ago, and aside from being a great example of clever infographics, he presents an interesting management consultancy style case study of the income of a typical Viagra spammer.

The end result might seem surprising — assuming the spammer can send a million emails a day, he/she will earn $29,200 per year - not a bad sum, considering the minimal work involved.

Stuart estimates a 0.02% click-through rate, and a 1% conversion rate — I think I’d have put the conversion rate a little lower, but arguably the 1 million email per day estimate is a little on the conservative side.

This article in SearchSecurity (via Hawk Wings) suggests that a botnet responsible for the current wave of image spam is capable of sending a billion emails per day.

I’ve been asked by friends why junk email, continues to be such a problem when filtering software gets better and better, and Stuart gives a pretty good idea of the scale of the gains to be made: spam pays.