U.S. businesses are paying through the nose when it comes to the time workers spend deleting spam from their e-mail. The price is almost $22 billion per year, according to a new study conducted by Rockbridge Associates and the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business’s Center for Excellence in Service.
“We all know that spam is a nuisance,” said the center’s director, Roland Rust, announcing the findings February 3, “but this allows us to assign a real value to what it is costing U.S. society. A $1 billion solution doesn’t sound so outrageous in the shadow of a $22 billion-a-year problem.”
Rockbridge president Charles Colby agreed. “This should serve as a loud wake up call to government and business,” he said.
The study found that almost four out of five adults surveyed during November 2004 received spam daily, and 11 percent of the online population gets at least 40 spam messages a day, while 14 percent of those who said they got spam opening it to see what’s said.
The study also showed that, in the previous 12 months, 4 percent of Web-connected adults bought a product or service they learned about in a spam message, while two-thirds of the respondents swept their accounts clean of spam at least once a week and a quarter did it every day.
The $22 billion a year cost estimate, the report said, is a conservative estimate that doesn’t count the wasted resources used to transmit spam or the costs to Internet service providers to manage and protect their customers from spam, not to mention how much consumers and businesses spend on spam-blocking programs.
“Our multi-billion dollar estimate provides an indication of the societal benefit to be derived from successful efforts by the government, business and non-profit sectors to control the problem of excessive spam,” the report continued. “For instance, if these sectors spent $1 billion per year in technology and enforcement activities, and as a result reduced the time wasted from spam by half, the payoff over and above this cost would be almost $10 billion, a relative bargain.”
If there was good news, it was this result: almost a quarter of those surveyed said they tended not to get spam at all.
The problem with most current spam-fighting measures – from America Online, Yahoo, and Microsoft developing solutions together including address verification programs, to the controversial federal CAN-SPAM Act and a tough Maryland law slapping up to ten years behind bars for convicted spammers – is that the private solutions aren’t universal and many of the legislative ones are unenforceable, Colby said.
“While nobody really wants to change the freewheeling nature of the Internet,” he said, “we’re suggesting that there be greater collective impetus to invest in fundamental, maybe even drastic, changes.”
