One in ten users have bought products advertised in junk mail

[nonstop]

One in ten users have bought products advertised in junk mail

According to a survey conducted by security firm Mirapoint and market research company the Radicati Group, nearly a third of e-mail users have clicked on links in spam messages.

One in ten users have bought products advertised in junk mail.

[news.bbc.co.uk...]

[incrediBILL]

P.T. Barnum pretty much explained this phenomena a long time ago.

[bird]

Unfortunately there's no information available about how the participants in the survey were selected, so the data is 100% meaningless.

[lgn1]

One in Ten. Sounds like somebody misplace the decimal place. Maybe one in a thousand or 1 in ten thousand.

You only get 1 or 2% conversion from catalogue sales, so how would you get 5% better performance from scum of the earth marketing techniques such as spam.

Another point, how was the question asked. May of these spammers do push products that are available in stores.

ie. people buy Viagra from retail drug stores, but they also get 100 viagra spam messages aday. Did the spam influence their Viagra purchase. I don't think so.

[dmorison]

It isn't saying that spam has a 10% conversion rate; rather that 10% of spam recipients have purchased at least 1 item from all the spam they have ever received.

[lgn1]

I agree, however the article headline was

Bad e-mail habits sustains spam

which is not true based on the given facts.

Just another case of bad journalism.

[Wlauzon]

And the "nearly a third" can be misleading also. I often click on them, but only to see if I can get the originating domain etc to block them or ban them.

But .. I do know a couple of people that have bought things from spam. In one case it was one of those "cheap WinXP" things, which of course turned out to be an unregisterable copy of a German OEM version <snicker>.