What is the economic rationale for spamming a forum like BAUT?

[Nereid]

To register, create, and post a spam thread takes time and effort.

If done by a human, then there is a direct cost ... however computed, it is the value, in monetary units, of the time spent on the activity.

If done by a bot*, it is the cost of developing, deploying, and maintaining the bot-ware, and the internet account, amortised over the output of the bot.

For spamming to be worthwhile, as an economic activity, the return needs to be greater than the cost. What is the 'return on spam investment'?

The only things I can think of are:
- if someone clicks on a link in the spam post, someone, somehow, gets a 'click-through' payment
- if, after clicking, a reader of a BAUT post with a spam link surfs the site and signs up for something, then someone, somehow, gets a 'subscription' payment
- if 'signing up' involves making a real payment, then someone, somehow, gets a cut of the 'sign-up' fee.

Of course, there may be 'second-order' benefits; for example the increase in traffic to a site may improve that site's rankings (in some system), which in turn generates some (marginal) increase in revenue.

Too, there are non-economic benefits - someone may get their kicks from the challenge of spamming BAUT, and having the spam stay visible for more than one hour (this could, of course, be $$ too: "I bet you $100 that you can't spam BAUT in such a way that your spam stays visible for more than one hour!")

*There seems to be a bit of an urban legend about spam bots; wrt a forum like BAUT, do such things really exist?

[Frog march]

Originally Posted by Nereid

There seems to be a bit of an urban legend about spam bots; wrt a forum like BAUT, do such things really exist?

Ive googled passages of some spam in the past to find the same message from the same autor on many other forums, so I think that there really are spambots.

[mugaliens]

There are spam bots for message forums. However, forums like Baut which utilize a wavy graphic that cannot (as of yet) be read by software, but rather, only the human brain, are currently immune to spam bots.

The pattern-recognition software/hardware of the human brain is still decades away from being duplicated by a computer.

[Moose]

It depends on the spam, but there are several lucrative revenue streams spammers take advantage of.

The thing to remember is this: spammers don't care if the ad works. Just that they can get people to pay for having them sent. So if they can con some small business into paying 10 grand for spamming X number of message boards with a minimum of Y users each, well caveat emptor.

The business of hiring people to manually sign up for message boards has me a bit perplexed, but I guess it again comes down to finding people willing to pay through the nose to have it done, and finding people willing to do it for third-world sweatshop wages.

[Tog_]

Originally Posted by Moose

The business of hiring people to manually sign up for message boards has me a bit perplexed, but I guess it again comes down to finding people willing to pay through the nose to have it done, and finding people willing to do it for third-world sweatshop wages.

"Earn extra cash from your home. All you need is a computer with an internet connection ans 10-15 hours per week." I see many ads that look just a bit lkike this.

[Nereid]

Originally Posted by Frog march

Ive googled passages of some spam in the past to find the same message from the same autor on many other forums, so I think that there really are spambots.

That there are bots which can quickly post a message (or a dozen messages) to a forum (or a dozen fora), using already established accounts, I don't doubt*.

In well-moderated fora, like BAUT, this is pretty useless, not because the spam is quickly detected and removed, but because the account is quickly banned ... permanently. So the effectiveness of that account, to generate spam, is low.

*Though it would be interesting to get some time stamps on such 'spam attacks' - multiple messages, across multiple fora - to see just how fast it actually does happen ... and compare that with what a human could do.

[Moose]

Those ubiquitous black on yellow signs nailed to trees and phone poles all over the back highways. Yeah, we have those everywhere too. "Put your computer to work, call 555-SCAM".

[Nereid]

Originally Posted by Moose

It depends on the spam, but there are several lucrative revenue streams spammers take advantage of.

The thing to remember is this: spammers don't care if the ad works. Just that they can get people to pay for having them sent. So if they can con some small business into paying 10 grand for spamming X number of message boards with a minimum of Y users each, well caveat emptor.

The business of hiring people to manually sign up for message boards has me a bit perplexed, but I guess it again comes down to finding people willing to pay through the nose to have it done, and finding people willing to do it for third-world sweatshop wages.

Yeah, that makes sense - pay me a fixed price, not for what I commit to deliver ... and yeah, there are thousands of individuals, with purchasing power, who would so pay.

But it moves the question back one step - what is the economic incentive for such businesses to contract a specialist (spammer) to spam for them?

[Donnie B.]

Originally Posted by Nereid

Yeah, that makes sense - pay me a fixed price, not for what I commit to deliver ... and yeah, there are thousands of individuals, with purchasing power, who would so pay.

But it moves the question back one step - what is the economic incentive for such businesses to contract a specialist (spammer) to spam for them?

Perhaps it falls under the heading, "Hope springs eternal".

[eugenek]

Originally Posted by Nereid

Yeah, that makes sense - pay me a fixed price, not for what I commit to deliver ... and yeah, there are thousands of individuals, with purchasing power, who would so pay.

But it moves the question back one step - what is the economic incentive for such businesses to contract a specialist (spammer) to spam for them?

Maybe the incentive is it works? I forget the numbers but for junk mail the sender only needs a very small percentage of recipients to respond to break even. I wonder if the number is even smaller for spam which doesn't have to worry about postage? I think I've only ever seen one spam on BAUT before it was killed but other forums seem to have lots of spam which lives longer. If just one person in 10,000 responds positively...

[Moose]

Speaking to semi-legitimate fly-by-nights, rather than the scammers, but these folks either can't afford to put commercials on TV, TV stations won't take their ads, or the businesses are shady enough that they want to avoid being seen by regulators.

Spammers tend to promise that they send only to mature opt-in targetted lists with a higher-than-normal response while undercutting TV ads, blah blah blah not really spamming blah blah blah.

Fly-by-night business owners, the sort who'll chatter incessantly about "the biz" to anyone who will listen (and anyone who won't), aren't really known for their scepticism, business savvy, or grasp of ethics across that demographic. As for which trait is involved, well you can makes your picks and takes your chances on any of 'em I guess.

The really illuminating question becomes: how many of these fly-by-night types are repeat clients?

[Tog_]

I was thinking about this on the drive home just now. WHat about the other side of the issue? What about all of the forums that dont' get spammed that seem like they should. This may ramble, grab a snack.

There are a lot of MMORPGs out there (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game). The one I play currently is City of Heroes/Villains. There are 11 game servers for the US with between 600 and 3000 active players each. Each player has the option of setting up a Supergroup in game. Becasue the members need a place to hook up out of game, most large SG's have a website with forum. Nearly all of these use one called Guildportal. GP serves not only this game, but several others. In fact, Just about every MMO out there will be represented by GP. It's also free to use (with limitations) or you can have the unlimited version for 30 bucks every 6 months. The ease of use, and ability to customize the sites makes them very popular. I'd estimathe there are thousands of active sites run through this service. You can even set up links to people in other games. If I played CoH, and someone else had a site for World of Warcraft, we could link the forums so we could both see the same threads from our respective sites. To top ot all off, if I set up the site, it's mine. I have 100% admin control over it, and unless I allow it, no one else does. Setting up an account is free, and will allow a person to post on ANY site on the service. A person can have multiple accounts per e mail address, too. (Getting to the point)

There is a huge call in many of these games for the good loot (treasure, items, and so on), as well as whatever the currency is. There is also powerleveling, where a person will get your characters a lot higher in level a lot faster than they would ever be able to do on their own. There are a few places that have set up a service to sell in game items or PL service for real money.

I've seen several of these ads here, usually in the middle of the night (US Mountain). I have never seen a single one in two years of being on the CoH forum. It's just as easy to register for that one, and once set up, it would give them access to thousands, possibly tens of thousands of forums that would never even talk to each other. Not one has ever showed up. I'm starting to wonder why the spammers would skip the actual target market to advertise to a smaller group, that would seem to have little interest.

[Eoanthropus Dawsoni]

I administer a few forums and I have noticed that at least in those forums very few spammers post a message. They will just join a forum and list a link to a website in their profile. I suspect that they do this in order to boost their website's ranking with Google and other search engines.

The stupid spammers post a message. When they do, I record their IP before I delete the message and ban the member. Then I look up the IP http://www.dnsstuff.com/ and will ban the entire IP range that comes back from the look up.

By far the greatest number of spammers come from Russia. China, Korea, and Germany also seem to produce a great deal of spammers. They will almost always list "USA" as their location on the profile however their IP or email address will usually indicate otherwise. I suspect that at least in Russia and China the spammers hire a crew of people to spend all day joining forums. Labor in Germany and Korea does not come that cheap so I suspect that those spammers are probably smaller operations.

Often I will watch my forums and when I see guest IP that I do not recognize I will do a search. If the IP shows that it is from one of the spam countries I will ban the IP range before the "guest" can join the forum.

[farmerjumperdon]

Interesting scams, but it would seem that as a bottom line someone must buy something for these things to continue. I mean sure, a spammer might be getting paid to deliver some number of messages, but in the end if nobody who gets the messages buys, the activity should dry up, . . . right?

So who actually buys anything as the result of getting a spam message? I never even open them, much less use the links and end up buying anything.