SPORN, how Spam and Porn spawned today's internet

    Spam is NOT sexy. But sex and Spam have a long relationship. The first email sent to EVERYONE on the internet (about 10,000 in the mid '80s) was allegedly sent by a professor inviting one and all to his bachelor party. Most of the internet's use at that time was amongst college educators and the military. Professorial shenanigans undoubtedly ensued.

    It wasn't until the advent of Netscape Navigator in 1994 that the world wide web became widely used by the public, eventually reaching today's 2 billion plus users. It didn't take long for Spam's marketing benefits to become apparent. But the first "angel" investors to fully make use of Spam were primarily from the porn industry. Their 60 plus years of earning capitol put them in a position to supply a ton of revenue.
    The big money men in porn saw huge dollar signs in Spamming. They gambled chunks of revenue on the numbers, trusting that modern man will see a sexually provocative image pop up on the screen…and he will click on it.

    Simultaneously porn funded the research that went into online video and streaming technology. The roots of Youtube, for instance can be directly traced back to porn. The venture capitalists pushing the technological advancement of the internet didn't yet see the value in video tech on the 'net. Porn saw it as the future.

    In the peak era of Spamming effectiveness, about '99-'02, the monetization of Spam advertising was off the charts. This is when the internet was new and each email received was taken at face value and read, even an ad for penis enlargement.  If users even clicked, the ads were considered effective. This is the "Click-Through Ratio" and the companies who got readers to click through were paid per click. Even better though was the "Conversion Ratio", when users actually bought the product.

     At it's peak a Spam ad could convert 1 in 20,000 views to clicks to purchase- that's one email in twenty thousand resulting in an actual sale. If a billboard turned that kind of result it would have been the most successful billboard in the history of advertising.

    Spam houses were set up, data center facilities with an extremely fast internet pipe poured data into the new US market. Warehouses with rack mounted servers ran emailing software that read off a list. Lists were comprised of target audiences and compiled from the spending habits of consumers.

    Every 20 million emails sent a day earned 6 to 7 to 8 grand. So if you get 6 grand a machine, and you set up 10 machines sending at once… you're making huge profits.
     Most of these Spam houses were young programmers just out of college. They could take a few grand, start up a Spam farm and be off. Some of the best were reported to clear over $2 million A DAY. Nobody making that much easy money cared what it was they were advertising. Nine times out of ten it was porn sites or boner pills. The results told the truth: most of the people using the internet were young men who wanted to look at porn and wanted to keep an erection should they ever encounter a real girl.

    We had found a new technology and we used it mostly to masturbate with. We had evolved, but only to a certain degree. The companies that realized how close we still were to our animal urges were the ones that profited most from it.

    Then regulation stepped in. Within a few years some of these young people who ran the Spam houses (and had no experience laundering money) were tracked down and found themselves facing lawsuits by companies like AOL
seeking up to 400 million dollars in damages. Ferraris were confiscated, houses were seized and some prison time was even served.  But Spam farms were too lucrative to dismantle and they simply moved offshore, now in the hands of Eastern European organized crime families.

    To this day millions of Spam messages are sent daily. Ironically, porn had already long outgrown the use of Spam. Before regulation changed the internet, porn had become primarily ad based. Porn had "legitimized" while Spam became increasingly cracked down upon. Porn began streaming and running ads alongside it's content. It no longer had any use for anonymous Spamming.

    Over the course of the internet's development, Spam has been employed by thousands upon thousands of different products. During the recession it had the best results with "Work From Home" and "Stock Tip" ads. Some have had greater success than others. After regulation, Spam was used mostly to promote "illegitimate" products, scams and drugs not FDA approved.

  And even today, Viagra is the world's most successful Spam client. It's Spam ads result in a 1 out of 80,000 conversion rate. One in 80,000 who see it, buy it. WIth Viagra's parent company, Pfizer, reporting $64 Billion in earnings last quarter no one can doubt they know what they're doing.
Even with porn out of the Spam game, the boner pill still gets results.
Now tell me we didn't evolve from apes. The money guys have been betting on it all along.