For those that don’t click through to damnian’s blog post, he has been contacted by someone that “knows a lot of spammers” and in return for putting a small link on his (damnian’s) site this person will “talk to them, and get them to stop” or at least reduce their activites. It’s the old shakedown for protection money scam, reborn for the blogosphere. I think I will pass.

http://blog.phpbb.cc/2007/09/05/the-final-solution-to-comment-spam/

Once the spammer has a database of registrations, they can either a) sell it, or b) use it, or c) do both. What I have seen over the past year or so is that all of our (board owners) attempts have been focused on keeping the bots from registering. Very little effort has been put into parts 2 and 3 of what I listed in my blog post. Let’s say that out of those 800 boards they get registered on they now turn loose a posting bot, as opposed to a registration bot. They are able to post on 80% of those boards. The number is high because as I said very few boards implement a CAPTCHA or other mechanism for posting, only for registration. 80% of 800 is 640 boards.

Suppose each board has about 100 members that are active and see the links, and suppose they get 0.5% click-thru rates on whatever links they spam. 640 boards * 100 users * 0.005 is 320 people. If they earn $0.50 per click they’ve earned $160. It cost them $75 per 800 boards.

If you take those numbers and extrapolate to the tens of thousands of boards on the web, it’s easy to see where the incentive is. Using the $0.50 CPC as a baselinem, what is the break-even point? With 100 members on 640 boards that’s 64,000 potential clickers. How many clicks do I need to make my $75 investment back? I need 150 clicks. 150 clicks from 64,000 people is 0.23%. That means 2.3 out of one thousand people have to click my spam links and I break even.

Let’s say there’s half a million boards out there, each with 100 members, and the click rates are at my original number which was a half a percent (0.005). That’s a quarter million clickers, and $125,000 in revenue for me. Even if the click rate is a quarter of a percent (0.0025) then I still get $62,500 in click revenue.

The only way to truly stop spam is to make it unprofitable. The only way to make it unprofitable is to increase their cost or reduce their revenue. Adding anti-spam measures to a board is one way to increase their cost. But the only true way to affect the spammer’s bottom line is to reduce their revenues. And I am afraid that we don’t have any control over that.

// By the way, you are welcome to my new blog http://bbspam.com/