posted on March 13, 2001 03:43:53 PM
Well, I don't consider junk mail legitimate any more either. It is part of the problem. That's why I refer to "direct marketing" more than some particular version of it. I was increasingly pestered by ads from snail mail, the phone, and email, and if I hadn't learned what's going on, I'd keep getting more and more from all directions. I'm tired of it all.
In the absence of companies sending prior customers repeated mail every few months for years, selling out their customers behind their backs to even more direct marketers, and especially telemarketing period, I wouldn't have minded an occasional ad from someone that I had actually bought from in the relatively recent past. Really, I wouldn't have.
Nowadays, though, that is but a small part of the volume, to the point I can't or don't care to tell it apart from the rest. I see lots of auction related spam (in fact, that is currently ~95% of my spam). How would I ever know, outside of being aware of something like the hypothetical co-op idea, the spam as something that might really be worth my time?
The problem with "one time," unfortunately, is that there are plenty of spammers already sending one-time ads. I see plenty of spam that isn't just changing addressing, but genuinely seems to the be first from a company, that I don't see repeated again. So what? Nowadays, 3/4 or more of my spam looks like that. In the past, 3/4 or more of my spam was from a few sources like CyberPromo. Same difference. Same quantity of spam, all of it unsolicited, all of it taking some of my time to even just delete.
I do, however, sympathize with the lost or muddied opportunity that email could have represented to many smaller marketers.
Spam could have enjoyed an uneasy tolerance like junk mail generally does, if it hadn't been for "Spamford" Wallace (CyberPromo) and others sending tons of his spam and teaching thousands of others how to bulk spam way back in 1996 (IIRC). They pumped up the volume so high, so quickly, so early in the growth of the email medium into mass popularity, that it was an instant "in your face" problem.
Even the Direct Marketing Association reportedly knows that it's going to be very difficult to get any real appearance of legitimacy around email marketing for at least quite awhile.
So you can blame the "zealots," but you can also blame the CyberPromos of past, who poured a ton of junk into a then-smaller well, shoved people's faces into it, then swaggered about and more or less said we'd all have to come to accept it. Of course many people would react strongly to that.
Even "Spamford" eventually admitted this was the wrong course for email marketing to have taken. This also perhaps set the stage for reaction to DoubleClick and other privacy concerns. Offline abuses such as many DMVs, pharmacies, credit bureaus, major banks, and colleges (among others) selling their often detailed customer info isn't helping either. But back to just spam....
Yes, a one-time note isn't this sort of scale or abuse, but it still adds to the volume, and might seem quite indistinguishable from the rest of the noise.
I think most people trust "word of mouth" more than the often hyped-up ads they see anyway. It was the main mode of eBay's growth for years.
I won't pretend to have the answers. I can't say whether or not an opt-in list and word of mouth alone would provide for the kind of growth some might want, but that is the ugly background to spam war, as I see it, for whatever that is worth.
Provide an open opt-in invitation, and there is a good chance I'll join. Send me spam, and there is zero chance, plus the chance I may complain from years worth of disgust of spam and learned knowledge on how to fight it. Knowing about the co-op, for example, and I might possibly make an exception on the complain part (but probably not the join part) -- if, again, I can even recognize it apart from all the other auction sites or services I'm getting spammed about).
I like clicking on links like the ones AW provided, or that some sellers provide, and I even opt-in now and then. I don't like being spammed.
The spam war runs deep, the trenches were dug years ago, and the hypothetical email from the top seems stuck somewhere in no-man's land -- at best.
----
What's being done in the name of direct marketing nowadays is crazy.
The above are all just my opinions, except where I cite facts as such.
Oh, I am not dc9a320 anywhere except AW. Any others are not me.
Is eBay is changing from a world bazaar into a bizarre world?
[ Slight edit to fix a run-on sentence. ]
[ edited by dc9a320 on Mar 16, 2001 07:28 AM ]
posted on March 13, 2001 03:57:56 PM
I have several sellers who buy from me on a regular basis and say" please let me know when you have something new".Well I always have something new and have never just emailed them to let them know as I never wanted to be a bother. This is what I was thinking of doing, I don't know if it eBay legal or not.... I was thinking of enclosing a postcard with every purchase and asking them to sign it and return it if they would like to be put on a mailing list and be contacted maybe every other month, or quarterly as to my auction updates.Then I thought I could plan strategic listing dates when there would be alot available for them to bid on and no one would be emailed the dates if they didn't want to. Any input would be appreciated!
posted on March 13, 2001 07:21:21 PMrubylane, you know you answered your own question as to why snail junk mail is more acceptable then email spam. With snail mail the sender pays via postage and cost of the ads. With email the reciever pays via higher cost of service and time spent handling the spam.
Charge the sender about $.20 for each spam email they send out, and I might find it more acceptable.
posted on March 13, 2001 07:37:09 PM
well, Rubylane does bring up some very valid points. But since he does say in the same post that he uses snailmail marketing for his own business I am taking that to mean that snailmail marketing is the percieved "lesser of 2 evils".
posted on March 14, 2001 11:55:00 AMgjsi: Exactly! Spam is like junk faxes (before they were essentially banned). Junk faxes cost the recipient time and money in terms of increased toner, maintence and repair on the machines, sorting the desired faxes from the junk ones, and the risk of missing some of the desired faxes and throwing them out with the junk.
The case of spam is a bit more subtle, but very similar. I've heard estimates that perhaps 25% or more of all email is spam. ISPs have to have extra servers to handle the additional volume (and the maintenance and support costs for the extra servers), and often have to employ extra people to handle complaints, kick off spammers from their own systems, and still suffer more crashes if there is a sudden spike in spam passing through. Who ultimately pays for these additional costs? Well, us, the ISP subscribers, of course! Plus, we still have to sort through and take time to delete the spam we receive, and perhaps spend money buying and time installing and maintaining filtering software. In the end, perhaps an eighth to a quarter of our ISP cost is due to spam. $2.50-5.00/month, $30-60/year, $1500-3000 for the average adult lifetime (at current $ rates, of course).
I forgot about this cost. Add it to the $4000 rough estimate I came up with earlier, and that's $5500-7000 over your lifetime, at current rates, for the "privilege" of being pestered by pushy telemarketers or spammed. Don't forget to add in the time spent on all direct marketing, even if just to delete it or throw it out or hang up on it: perhaps the equivalent of five months worth of 8-hour work days.
It costs bulk spammers essentially only $20 per month to send as much as they can until they get kicked off, which if they send hundreds of thousands of emails before doing so. Tiny fractions of a penny per individual email/recipient -- that's their cost. It costs the spammer virtually nothing, but costs the recipient(s) plenty in the long run.
Junk (snail) mail, while the most wasteful in terms of physical resources, costs the recipient the least. The marketer has to pay for the costs of design, printing, and mailing. Recipients don't have to pay any money at all (or maybe a buck or two to write to the DMA and others to block most of it), though it does cost the recipient a little time to sort through, perhaps shred, and toss.
So from a cost-to-recipient standpoint, junk mail is the lowest in both time and money. Spam and telemarketing are much higher. From a cost-to-environment standpoint, junk mail is probably the worst.
You know what? Discussing infrastructure issues in regards to spam and junk faxes makes me wonder just how much more phone system infrastructure we've had to pay for so phone companies can keep up with extra volume that telemarketing adds.... I have no figures on how much of call volume is telemarketing, but if it is even 1/10, perhaps we're talking again about 1/20 - 1/10 of our monthly phone bill times the 600 months of an average adult lifetime. This could easily add another $1500-3000 to our personal costs. Could these numbers be even close? That each and every person, at current rates, would end up paying $7000-10,000 over his or her lifetime due to telemarketing and spam?
$1500-3000 additional ISP cost?
$1500-3000 additional phone system cost?
$3000 additional to get minimal CallerID
$1000 miscellaneous (e.g. filtering software over a lifetime)?
Yikes, I never ran all these numbers together before. Again, these are very rough estimates at best, and at current rates -- and I may be way off -- but there is definitely some cost to the recipient for unsolicited direct marketing. It's one of our most needless wastes of time, money, and paper, in my opinion.
(And yes, it is because roughly 0.5% of recipients do respond to direct marketing that makes it continue to exist, regardless of what the rest of us would rather see. )
Sorry about the length, I was just realizing some new wrinkles to the topic that I'd missed previously.
posted on March 14, 2001 04:24:46 PM
This argument that email costs ISP's a significant amount of money is mainly bull.
The average email advertisement is less than 3200 characters. 40 lines of text @ 80 characters each.
Do you realize that Yahoo's home page, without graphics, is 16K? And that each of those cute round buttons at the top is 5K? (there are 6) And that the banner ad in the middle is another 5K?
So 1 person loading Yahoo's home page ONCE is using as much as Internet bandwidth as 16 email messages.
The email "cost of bandwidth" argument makes no sense. Text-based email is the most bit-efficient communication mechanism on the Internet. It's a red-herring to get people fired up.
I am not advocating spam, just making a point that eliminating an efficient, effective (if targeted) advertising mechanism may cost as much or more in the long run as having to hit delete.
As for paying the 20 cents, I'd do that in a minute.
Jim
(edited to correct my math)
[ edited by rubylane on Mar 14, 2001 05:45 PM ]
posted on March 14, 2001 05:38:09 PM
rubylane -
Email is partially paid for by the recipient. In the cae of a CC or BCC email to a list, the portion paid for by the sender is tiny compared to the portion the sender forces the recipients to pay. By the time the recipient can "just hit delete", the costs have already been incurred and the bandwidth wasted. And the sender has FORCED the recipients to subsidize their advertising costs.
If telemarketing were done by unrefusable collect calls, and that postcard from the furniture store had come with an unrefusable postage due bill from the USPS ...... that's how spam works.
As for bandwith ... what I CHOOSE TO DOWNLOAD is one thing, and between me and myISP. What a spammer FORCES my ISP to handle in hopes of profit is forcing me to subsidize the senders advertising campaign. forcing others to pay for your business is THEFT.
It takes JUST as many CPU cycles to handle a 2K email as a 250K email ... that's bandwidth. A man in S CAL is facing felony charges because the spam he was sending crashed and burned the victim'smail server, causing them to lose customer mail and physical damage to the hardware.
posted on March 14, 2001 05:49:30 PM
Okay, so sending email is out, direct mail is out, word of mouth doesn't work (according to many posts here), banner ads don't work.
Just how do you propose a company get the word out about its services?
On the one hand people claim a site without advertising will not be successful, and on the other you balk if they advertise.
posted on March 15, 2001 10:05:20 AM
Yes, Internet pages can be bloated with lots of bandwidth. I've seen sites that make their buttons look essentially no different than what a color tag and text in HTML could do just as well -- a pointless waste.
However, email is still cited as being the "most popular" Internet application. What this means in volume terms, I don't know. As I stated in different words within my earlier posts, the numbers I made were largely speculative. Whether it's $3000 or more like $500 (over my lifetime at current subscription rates), it's too much. If direct marketers had collectively restrained themselves to sending me only a few notes a week, however, I would not have cared at all.
We must see somewhat different spam. While I get some 3K spam (an email with minimal headers and no body is 2K), the stuff I see tends larger than that, and get increasingly more with HTML attachments, which roughly triple the size. One or two even sent 15-40K images along! I'd say my average spam message carries about 8-10K, and has grown again to be about 20% of my email.
There is more to "bandwidth" when it comes to email. Downloading webpages is basically "just" throughput. Webpages and email both have to be sent through the ISP's servers, but email also has to be stored.
Banner advertising is an interesting nut. Some argue that banner advertising is measured on the wrong scale. The television and radio industries work well on the basis of "simple" exposure: how many are, to the best of current measuring technologies used, seeing or hearing the ads. Most people ignore TV ads, or sometimes ridicule them, but through a mixture of repetition, loudness, humor, etc., company names and even messages get out there nonetheless.
Most banner ads nowadays are used less like that and more like direct marketing. It shows: clickthrough rate is reported at 0.5% -- about the same number for direct marketing in general. Viewing rate, however, if it were measured, would likely provide near-TV (or near cable) numbers of eyeballs. Of course, the Internet is more interactive in nature than TV (and more than junk mail, though less or the same as telemarketing), so why are the numbers so low?
First, I think the banner ad industry did damage to itself. In trying to get two birds in hand (tracking as much about consumers as they can), they ended up with one in hand and one in the bush (e.g. filtering software, disabling cookies), to mangle the metaphor somewhat. It could be they find 50% of richer information better than 100% of less rich information, but when banner ad success is still largely measured in clickthrough, I'm not sure how they can view that as complete success.
Second, is relevance. I still click on some banner ads that have great site relevance, meaning if I go to a site on a particular subject, and they have ads for products useful for that or a similar subject, I will tend to click on such ads now and then (as long as the advertiser hasn't ended up in my HOSTS file over tracking), because it is so much more relevant. This seems more cost effective than collecting tons of info and making best guesses.
Third, the ads are often outright annoying, even more than TV ads. Banner ads that follow someone around the page (using JavaScript), garishly-blinking ads, multitudes of ads on each page (which also has the effect of lowering any one ad's possible effect). Besides tracking, this is another reason more people block the ads.
Fourth, people ultimately have to do more than just click on the banner ad, they have to find enough behind banner ads that are compelling enough for them keep buying and clicking more ads. The products and services have to be of sufficient level of interest and quality. Furthermore, the potential buyer also has to be willing to fill in those purchase forms with personal and CC information. None have gone all that smoothly overall. Fraud, lost items, poor return policies, excessive S&H, late deliveries, stolen CC information, other privacy snafus -- not to mention overblown expectations, like expecting people would start abandoning shopping malls or even the local grocery stores en masse to buy frequently similar items online have not proven out well -- have all been pretty well publicized.
Banner ads can be done without employing the methods of direct marketers, and can actually be more relevant and interesting. Opt-in newsletters, mailing lists, and such are other possibilities. Some initial exposure can lead to word of mouth, or mention in other fora (assuming they're genuine interest notes and not obvious or tacky shilling). Mentioning things in the EOA or a reasonable-length .sig, or in the "received payment" note, or with the package itself. One eBay seller even made a refrigerator magnet done up as a small movie poster, with their name on it. Guess what, I have it hanging on a metal table within sight of my computer, and do occasionally check their auctions from time to time, despite not really buying many such items. Then there are taking out ads in trade (or even general) publications. I'm probably missing some of the other ways, but despite disliking hype and all non-opt-in direct marketing, there are means of advertising I do find usable, or at least more tolerable. There is a lot more to marketing than just direct marketing.
Again, I do sympathize with the thought that there is/was potential with more direct forms of Internet marketing, but the CyberPromos and DoubleClicks have done well to aggravate enough people, so we now end up with thorough polarization, instead of the general tolerance that junk mail enjoys, or even the uneasy mixture of disgust and resignation that telemarketing "enjoys."
posted on March 15, 2001 04:51:41 PM
Here's a new one for me- it just came in an email from a seller I bought from once last year:
This email was sent from a seller using Andale's Auction Management Services. Andale respects your privacy and we require our sellers to respect your privacy as well. Please let us know if you don't want to receive future promotional emails by visiting our Buyer Email Preferences page at: http://www.andale.com/corp/buy/buy_spam_optout.jsp?cId=xxxxxxxxxx
Gotta love it...
Andale respects your privacy and we require our sellers to respect your privacy as well.
They respect your privacy so much, they will continue to allow sellers to spam you unless you go to their website and provide them with who knows what information.
It's always nice to get respect, don't you think?
[ edited by mrpotatoheadd on Mar 15, 2001 04:52 PM ]
posted on March 15, 2001 05:20:31 PM
Unsolicited is just that, whether it's junk mail, telephone solictitor or spam email.
I throw out junk mail without even reading it. I have call display and do not answer calls where it is clear it is a "solicitor"; if I answer the phone for a number that is unknown and it is a solicitor, I say "No thanks" and immediately hang up. I delete ALL spam without giving it a second look. Zero interest.
posted on March 15, 2001 05:22:44 PM
I am a begining seller, and sometimes, when I browse through auctions, I see someone has bidded on something and I have something that could tickle their interest. But then again there's the thought that some people might classify that as spam.
Should I or should I not contact them? Please shower me with your wisdom.
posted on March 15, 2001 06:01:38 PM
girlsrus--If you had read this thread at all you would have had your question answered.
Unsolicited email is spam. PERIOD. I don't care what you have to sell or what you think I might be interested in, but when you send me an email offering your wares without my having contacted you first, then you are sending SPAM.
Many users send such email to SPAMCOP who may contact your ISP. Other users forward such emails to Safeharbor.
posted on March 15, 2001 06:50:35 PM"Okay, so sending email is out, direct mail is out, word of mouth doesn't work (according to many posts here), banner ads don't work. Just how do you propose a company get the word out about its services?On the one hand people claim a site without advertising will not be successful, and on the other you balk if they advertise.Like I said, tough crowd...Jim"
The same way I do, and most legitimate businesses do... by paying for advertising via search lists as well as applying for the top 20 search engines, and maintaining same. The cost is both financial and time.
I currently pay for "click throughs" with GOTO; This service has placed me on various search engines, as well as on specifically placed (by the level of my click bid) listings on their site. The cost to me - about $5.00 to $6.00 a day from people clicking on my listing to go visit my site.
GOTO is not the only one out there - there are ALOT of others as well that will assist in getting "found" on the internet. None of these are cheap, but good advertising rarely is.
The month of february I had 1163 people view my site, at a total cost to me of $106.00. Cost to the customer - $0. As it should be.
I will readily read offers via snail mail from sellers, especially if they are offering me some sort of discount or showing me new products I may like; Cost to seller - $lots in postage; Cost to the customer - $0.
BTW, Jim, the tone of your replies may not, at least in my very humble opinion, reflect well on your own business. Advertising costs ALOT - don't lessen its positive effects by showing a less-than-consumer oriented attitude on forums read by thousands.
posted on March 15, 2001 08:03:39 PM
If it was about something that I collect or that I have bought before, or from someone I have dealt with, I would probably open it and see what it says. I might even go to their auction! And, spam or no spam - if I gotta have that widget I'm gonna bid on it.
Of course, you have just the subject line to interest me - and if it includes an attachment I will not for any reason open it.
posted on March 16, 2001 05:00:49 AM
"I find it laughable that a user like Abacaxi rails against spam when she/he/it obviously has a history of it."
smellahypocrite
Date Joined: March 15, 2001 07:40:31 PM
Message Center Posts: 1
I find it laughable that a user who posts within minutes of joining AW would already have investigated my sins. Can we say that someone's toes seem to have been stomped upon? Did he/she/it arrive with vengeance in mind? Does anyone care?
**********
Background: These users were repeatedly posting ads for their auctions, a home-compiled cookbook or recipe for a "charity" of dubious authenticity, a book, and their web-hosting services, onto all the eBay chat boards. At any time during their active period, there would be several ads from them on every single eBay message board. (there were others, but these were egregious and ubiquitous and more persistent than usual).
My repeated requests to them to cease the barrage of advertising were ignored. So I did two things ... I emailed them a copy of the ENTIRE MESSAGE board (about 250KB) every time they left an ad, and I left them Negative FBs (gee, I miss being the terror of the chat boards). These three retaliated.
************
Here's a little taste of her/his/its EBay feedback:
"User: xxxx Date: Jun-07-98 15:31:53 PST
Complaint: You spammed multiple user feedback areas...in violation of Ebay Policy."
Actually, I left ONE FB, not multiple ones, but it was for this user, and they were also offended that I reported them to eBay and they were told to cease and desist. Their dream of having a free way to advertise for their webhosting service evaporated. And the "spamming" his email was merely returning his ads to him, with a request to not post another one. I was not sending unsolicited email ads, I was complaining about chat board ads.
User: xxxxxx (53) Date: Jun-07-98 09:33:46 PST Complaint: SPAMMING ads for web hosting services into the auction area!
*****
"User: xxxx Date: Sep-01-98 12:32:03 PST
Complaint: Leaves unwaranted neg feedback and SPAMS peoples email. A REAL MENACE !!!!!!!!!! "
OH yes, the cake recipe one: She got tired of getting her spam back, via email because at 250K a pop, it fills a mail boc real fast.
User: xxxxxx (953) Date: Sep-01-98 11:43:15 PST Complaint: I'm getting tired of the cake recipe shills on every board I read.
************
"Check it out yourself. So, what is it Abacaxi...are you "Born Again?" Seems like the worst offenders make the biggest Evangelists. "
Yes, check it out! They eBay user name is abacaxi, and vrane.com has a neat little FB widget. And check out whats-his-face, if you can figure out who he/she/it is.
(edited because I can't type!)
[ edited by abacaxi on Mar 16, 2001 05:06 AM ]
posted on March 16, 2001 06:06:43 AM
Isn't it violation of AW's TOS to have two posting IDs?
I say this because obviously Mr. Smell-A-Hypocrite (likely one of those people who thinks spamming is a way to advertise his wares) is a dual poster who has registered with a new name to hide who he really is.
posted on March 16, 2001 09:09:41 AM
Barb/oxford: Thanks! And thanks to for providing even more examples. There are numerous ways to advertise without spending the consumer's time or money for them.
"Cost to the customer - $0. As it should be."
Exactly! As a consumer, I shouldn't have to spend my money (or time) on unsolicited ads. Thank you for nailing that one with great examples as a seller.
Non-direct marketing costs money too, as you pointed out, but it's the seller who should pay for that, not the target. Of course, in the general economic world, those costs will get figured into the price of the products a company is selling; but as a consumer, I only incur those costs when I choose to buy a product from that store. I don't spend a dime of my money paying for that store's advertising until the point I buy something, and if the store advertises so much that their product prices are ridiculous, I probably won't buy in the first place. These are natural economic checks and balances. Spamming, however, has little in the way of checks and balances, except for the complaints and battles of the recipients or their ISPs who have to pay most of the price.
With junk mail, so there is some balance here: companies can only afford to spend so much on bulk mail (spam, however, is so much cheaper for the sender that if people and ISPs weren't fighting spam, we could all end up receiving hundreds of times more spam per day than pieces of junk mail). Timewise, however, I have to sort through such junk mail, make sure a bill or something I want doesn't get mixed into a junk flyer and get tossed, shred the CC offers, and occasionally take an extra bag of paper out to be recycled. Small increments of time, but they add up, and are needless wastes, IMO. (Also, paperwise, that's a lot of trees for ~0.5% response/use rate. )
Telemarketing, another form of direct marketing, in itself doesn't cost me money, but it has prompted me to pay extra $/month for CallerID, just to filter out pushy calls I never remotely wanted in the first place; and timewise, it still costs me the time to get up and check the ID (and costs those who don't have CallerID even more time wrangling with often pushy telemarketers).
Spamming costs me time and money. Even if my earlier $3000 "guesstimate" might be too high (or it might not), I refuse to believe I'd spend any less than $500 on unwanted spam (at current rates), because that would be only 4% of a $20/month bill, and I'd find it hard to believe that spam would take any less additional ISP overhead (bandwidth, storage, maintenance, personnel resources) than 4%. Take your pick of numbers, but I have to believe it is somewhere between 4% ($500) and 25% ($3000).
Contrast to some non-direct marketing.... Radio commercials don't cost me time or money (unless, again, I choose to buy a product from a company that is running ads). TV commercials also don't cost me time: I'm always ready to do something else when commercials hit. They don't cost me money, and indeed pay for broadcast TV and keep me from having to pay cable bills many times higher. Some commercials are annoying, but even if so, they at least aren't spending my time or money for me. Ditto on ads plastered on race cars or billboards. Barb's examples of her paying for ads also don't cost me anything for me as a consumer to see those placed ads.
Indeed, placing an auction on eBay could be considered a form of non-direct marketing. The seller pays a fee to place an ad, but potential buyers are free to browse all the listings without having to pay for the ads. (eBay, however, places cookies on the listings, however, so there is still a direct marketing aspect, but I don't blame the sellers for that, and block eBay's cookies).
So this is a way of figuring the difference between ads. Ask oneself if the means of advertising is forcing the seller to spend extra time or money even if they never buy something. A consumer should only incur the cost of advertising a product or service when they actually choose to buy that product or service.
----
What's being done in the name of direct marketing nowadays is crazy.
The above are all just my opinions, except where I cite facts as such.
Oh, I am not dc9a320 anywhere except AW. Any others are not me.
Is eBay is changing from a world bazaar into a bizarre world?
-Jim