---
url: 'https://dri.es/spamalytics-how-spammers-make-money'
title: 'Spamalytics: how spammers make money'
author:
  name: 'Dries Buytaert'
  url: 'https://dri.es/about'
date: '2008-11-10T16:48:05-05:00'
license: 'https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/'
type: blog
tags:
  - Mollom
published: true
id: 529
---

# Spamalytics: how spammers make money

Ever wondered how spammers can be profitable? According to [this BBC article](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7719281.stm), researchers have calculated that those sending unsolicited e-mails can make a profit by attracting just one sale from every 12.5 million spam e-mails sent. Even though their conversion rates are well under 0.00001%, big spam networks generate more than $3.5 million USD in annual revenue. All it takes is thousands of hijacked machines sending hundreds of millions of spam messages a day. More details in [the original research paper](http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/pubs/networking/2008-ccs-spamalytics.pdf) (PDF) by Chris Kanich et al. *Crazy!*
