Oh No, Even Spammers Are Hit By Financial Crisis And Losing Customers

We have talked already about how difficult the business is for spammers with such a terrible rate of return that they need to send out 12.5 million of spam emails to get just one purchase. But it now looks like spammers will soon be in an even worse condition as cybercrime is hit by the financial crisis same as other industries are.

I have received a report from Kaspersky Lab today in which they describe the usual statistics of spam activities in February. The most interesting finding from the survey is that it now looks like spammers are actually losing customers that have been loyal to spam as a tool for promotion for years.

This disturbing (for spammers, I mean) trend means that some industries that have been most actively advertised with spam emails are losing their top positions giving place to those industries that have never even been there. Here you can see the top 5 categories of products and services that were mostly advertised in spam emails along with their respective shares of spam emails devoted to them:

The interesting part here is that the share of the medications category (the one that is supposed to help everyone in the world be happy) is rapidly decreasing: in January it accounted for 25.3% of all spam emails and in the end of February only 10% of all spam emails offered to buy some magic pills. I am not quite certain how it happened but chances are that people are now more concerned with their jobs and have less time to dream of a perfect sex life so they ignore such ads more frequently than they used to so the sellers are less willing to invest in advertising with a significant decrease in sales - though this is merely my guess.

At the same time this decrease is partly compensated by growth in the real estate category where recipients are mostly served ads related to rent of office space. Here the reason is quite obvious: the number of offices left unoccupied due to companies closing or at least downsizing is rapidly growing and the owners are looking for additional ways to advertise available options - and do it without huge expenses as well (and spam is known to be a cheap advertising medium). This trend has brought real estate to the top 5 category for the first time.

Of course now we should know things are very bad in the economy with even spammers affected but the irony is that while spammers are losing their loyal customers in certain categories, they are also substituting them with new ones or at least they always have an option to send endless messages advertising their own services: this is the top category for them anyway so they could easily increase the number of messages they send to grow their businesses if they don’t have enough paying customers. Which unfortunately for you and me means that we won’t see less spam emails in our inboxes - no matter how much less spammers make in the process.