The Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland has released the 2004 Technology Readiness Survey. The headline they’ve chose for it is National Survey Finds 22.9 Million Hours a Week Wasted on Spam.
The headline should be National Survey Finds How Badly You Can Mess Things Up By Asking Consumers To Self-Report Online Behavior.
The methodology was to ask 1000 people various questions, including how many spam e-mails they receive and how much time they spend deleting e-mails. The average person reports receiving 18.5 e-mails, and the average person reports spending 2.8 minutes in a typical day deleting spam.
Now do the math.
According to this survey, the average person spends 9.08 seconds deleting each spam they receive.
Try looking at a spam e-mail for nine seconds. You can’t do it. You know it’s spam in the first second – the first two if you’re slow. You can delete it in another second – another two if you’re slow.
My guess – just a guess, not the product of expensive, useless survey research – is that they have overestimated the impact and cost of spam by at least 100%.
Until they come up with a more reliable survey method, we know nothing more about the cost of spam than we did before this survey was done.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
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