Vendors spamming NANOG attendees

Wed Jun 14 19:24:07 UTC 2017

On June 13, 2017 at 22:16 niels=nanog at bakker.net (Niels Bakker) wrote:
 > * mel at beckman.org (Mel Beckman) [Tue 13 Jun 2017, 21:26 CEST]:
 > >And your proposed solution is?
 > 
 > Simple.  Stop buying from spammers.

Although a perfectly reasonable suggestion the problem is that the
cost of spamming is so low that even yielding zero clients isn't much
of a loss. And if just one person finds the tease interesting it's a
big win for the vendor.

So there's a huge scaling advantage with spam, always has been.

It's more akin to someone going thru your neighborhood with a vehicle
with a bullhorn at 3AM suggesting some product.

Merely deciding not to patronize them may not be sufficient and that's
why we make that sort of thing just outright illegal rather than hope
market forces will suffice.

Another problem is that even with zero direct returns the sender gets
other value.

The usual rule of thumb used to be that you had to see an ad about
eight times before your were likely to remember the product. So, spam,
7 more times.

And branding.

You goog for a particular type of router or whatever and you're hit
with several that seem like they'd do the job.

But you don't recognize the vendor names which makes you
uneasy...except that one, hmm, that's a familiar name...not sure
why...ok let's give them a closer look...

They're getting value even if not immediately obvious. And you'll
probably forget they spammed you long before you stop recognizing
their name as familiar.

The point is why should they get all that value for just about free?

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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