Welcome to SEO Advantage’s Friday Trivia feature, where we’ll discuss, dissect and comment on the history of the internet and marketing, and how the two intertwine. First up: spam. How did your least favorite thing to find in your inbox become so pervasive?
Question: What percentage of e-mail sent worldwide each day is spam?
32%
66%
81%
Answer: 81%
Kind of shocking when you think about it that way, isn’t it? Less than 1/5 of all e-mail actually constitutes valid communication. But what makes the other 81% spam, and how long has this been going on?
The Origins of E-Mail Spam
The people who created the practice of online spam in 1994 were actually quite proud of what they had discovered. Of course, they had no way of knowing what the internet would become, or of predicting that their creation would end up being considered a scourge.
As the story goes, two attorneys from Arizona hired a programmer to post a message to as many newsgroups as possible. They thought they had discovered the future of marketing – a way to advertise to a large audience for free. What they didn’t count on was a society that was growing weary of seeing advertising everywhere they went, and an online culture that was already very protective of its social space.
The backlash against this practice started almost immediately, but it wasn’t until 2003 that the CAN-SPAM act was signed into law. Even this didn’t do much to curb the flow of unsolicited e-mails, though. In fact, the law is rarely even enforced.
E-Mail Providers Take the Reins
Spammers see what they are doing as free marketing (we’ll get to how real marketers see it in a moment), but it’s not free, at least not to e-mail providers whose space and bandwidth spammers abuse.
That’s why the majority of legal action against spammers has been spearheaded by these e-mail providers, and why today just about every e-mail provider in existence is proactive about protecting themselves and their customers from unwanted e-mails, many of which are scams, contain viruses, or support illegal activity. Spam servers are blocked, and spam e-mails that do get through are easily labeled and shunted into specific mailboxes where we can delete them en-masse without even opening them.
E-mail Spam versus Marketing with Integrity
I’m sure e-mail spammers consider themselves marketers, but those of us who practice online marketing ethically consider them pests who make our work much, much harder. It takes quite a bit to separate ourselves from these types. We rise to the challenge, of course, but it can be an uphill battle when most people hear “online marketing” and think, “spam.”
At SEO Advantage we would never, ever advise a client to send unsolicited e-mail. Our approach involves creating resources that make users want to visit our clients’ websites. We provide a service to clients by helping them provide a service to their customers. It’s the polar opposite of what spammers and scammers do, and it stems from a difference in core philosophy.
The internet may have made it possible for marketers to create new and unique ways to try to trick people, but it also created the unprecedented opportunity for marketers to provide a service to the community as well as the clients we serve.
Unfortunately, spam e-mails may be something you’ll always have to deal with, but SEO Advantage is one company that won’t be sending them.