Survey: 29% Bought Spam Email Products, But Who Cares?

Results from a new survey by Marshal are in, and apparently 29% percent of the respondents to a recent survey admitted they made purchases from spam messages. That number is up from a 2004 survey in which only 20% admitted doing so. I was all set to vent about people getting sucked in when I realized something: who cares?

Marshal's VP of Products, Bradley Anstis, said "Many of us often question ourselves, why is there so much spam? The answer is, enough people are purchasing products from spam to make it a worthwhile and profitable endeavour for spammers."

Well duh. Thanks for the press release!


People decide to buy things from all kinds of unwanted sources: flyers, stickers, magazine insert cards, bumper stickers, board signs at hockey games. Why is it big news that people buy products advertised in spam?

Here's the kicker: the survey only involved 600 people. Is it worse that about 180 of those people bought products from spam, or that media outlets are willing to jump all over a statistic that comes from a sampling of less than .0001% of the roughly 360 million people currently using the internet? Hey, 100% of the people in my house have never made a spam purchase. Take that!

Let's do our own poll and see how you, our savvy Download Squad readers stack up. Have you bought something that was just too good to pass up, even if it was spam? We'll shoot for more than 600 votes.

Tags: email, spam, statistics, surveys