Ninety Trillion Spams and Counting: Rethinking the Marketing Social Contract in a Web 2.0 World
Fred K. Beard · Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks · 2013
As I contemplated the best way to begin this chapter, a thought occurred to me: “I wonder how much spam there is, really?” A search of the Web produced a fairly quick and credible answer. According to website Pingdom.com, the number of e-mails sent worldwide in 2010 was 107 trillion and about 90% of them were spam, which works out to the 90 trillion spams I mention in my title. It also works out to some 292 billion spams a day or about 100 for each of 2010’s 2.9 billion e-mail account holders. Let us pause for a moment and offer a prayer of gratitude for the inventor of the spam filter. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.