How Spammers see themselve

HELMET So, Lone Starr, now you see that evil will always triumph, because good is dumb.

Jeff Attwood quoted this from Spacesballs in his post on Designing for Evil. The link to a scrummy blackhat forum he provided is quite interesting, and after reading along, I found some comments worth quoting.

I ended at a blogpost about Making Money With Ringtones, where the author describes agressive tactics for ringtone affiliate marketing: Download videos from Youtube, add watermarks that point to your domain (which redirects to the ringtone offering), upload them on youtube and on torrent and P2P networks. Most of that can be automated using different tools which he points at.

To me that sounds like spam all along, which a commenter pointed out:

I didn’t know that you resorted to spam to make your money.

So, what do the acused-of-spamming spammers think about that? The author himself (higlighting by me):

jayme – You can look at is as spam or as doing what almost 90% of what others do on video sites. Find something cool and reupload it.

I can tell you haven’t read the blog thoroughly. I do some aggressive tactics and if your not down with that I really could care less if your reading.

Some other visitor:

SPAM comes from a can and tastes like crap. This, on the other hand, is creative marketing.

Or this one:

that ‘resorting to spam’ comment was hilarious. The way I see it, you’ve gotta be ‘creatively aggressive’ to get paid in this game. Like Gordon Gekko said ‘it’s trench warefare out there…’.

I feel like puking while reading on, but I guess thats the price of trying to get less dumb in respect to spammers. We have to understand that spammers don’t see themselves as such. They are “just trying to make some money”. Hey, as long as they don’t deal with drugs or kill someone, it can’t be that bad, can it? We are lucky that they don’t roam the streets and slap people in the face with their ringtone offerings, after all, that would be creative and agreesive, too.

It would be fun to discuss this with a I’m-not-a-spammer spammer.

-Jörn

No more comments.
  1. “I do some aggressive tactics and if your not down with that I really could care less if your reading.”

    You *use* aggressive tactics, not “do” them.

    “you’re” not your (in both instances).

    “couldn’t care less” not “could care less”. If you could care less it implies you care at the moment. The idea is to communicate that you hold no value in the opinion being expressed, not that you do.

    A single sentence which is a clear indicator that the person in question is careless at best, and more likely the spamming asshat they appear to be.

  2. Erik

    “We are lucky that they don’t roam the streets at slap people in the face with their ringtone offerings, after all, that would be creative and agreesive, too.” — Actually, *they’re* lucky – if one of these losers tried this in my visible range they wouldn’t likely survive the event…

  3. Jonathan

    I don’t think it’s as simple as people make it out to be. I’ve worked on legitimate e-mail campaigns for several companies, and I see e-mail classified into 3 categories:

    1. Not Spam – Emails from families and friends, opt-in newsletters that you actually read, etc…

    2. Clearly Spam – Misleading advertisements going to harvested email addresses (WHOIS contacts, forum posts, etc).

    3. Marketing – The majority of e-mails are marketing attempts. They’re not really spam, but they’re not really anything YOU want right now. However, it could be just what another 30% of the recipients were looking for. So “creative marketing” might make you puke, but you might just be the wrong target. Similarly, some advertisements that you might like might make someone else puke, even though they are sent out with aggressive/creative marketing.

    It’s really subjective.