StartupAvenues

It seems that finally some smart startup has been able to build traffic by using spam as an effective tool. In last 1-2 months majority of us must have got this tagged mail where some user seems to have tagged you or somebody else. With a familiar Indian sounding name, the click rate was high in order to just find all about it as 98% of spam mails have a western name and suddenly we realized that for a change somebody has used spamming efficiently and in process build a huge traffic (Alexa ranking is 78). But what make us believe think this is a spam mail???

Majority of tagged message received were from some generic Indian names from gmail and yahoo accounts and looked genuine enough so how could it be a Spam mail. But again devil is in detail and on careful scrutiny we found out that all this tag message are send to generic mail ids like sales, info, customer support of a particular domain name and so on so forth , the addresses which have been mined by spamers and hence so many tagged messages. Further this mails flew to yahoo group owners and tried to mine open mailing lists so as to reach out to potential users who by mean of curiosity might end up clicking the mail as for a Indian name with a tag message, curiosity level will be very high.

In the above, a user has tagged a list owner at Yahoogroups of which he is neither member nor related to

Further all these mails though looking like coming from gmail or yahoo are basically coming tagged mail. It looks like the company has executed very smart strategy for building a mass traffic by going through human and robot combination where it first focused on country specific email lists and then used humans to create country/ region specific email ids and then configured them with its servers and then start shooting in a low volume but with very high response level. So does it cost a bomb for that. Not exactly, for USD 200 a month one can get a full time email data entry operator for a whole month who can easily create 100 email ids every day and send 100 mails from each id using little technology with a high response rate of ad high as 15-20% ( might be more as I never ever open a spam mail but I did open it once, so lot many other people) compared to totally automatic spam system where bounce rate is very high and success rate is hardly 0.2 % to 0.3%. Hence for USD 200 and additional USD 50 for network and other costs, one can get around 300,000 legible mails per month with a very high success. at a success rate of 20% it will be a cost of USD 2.00 per 1000 page impressions (assuming 2 page views per user and succes rae of 20%)

Further if you can generate enough page views you can get a ecpm of say even a low USD 1.00 , your cost per 1000 page views will be less than one USD while you gain huge mileage and footage without worrying about the bidding process and in case you get a good ecpm, or have appropriate Google Adsense, your income can very well be in range of USD 3 to 5 ecpm and then you will be making 1-2 USD per 1000 pages and if you serve some million pages per month!!!!

So got Tagged!!!