tags: Spam
Analysing MyNiceMailAt.com
November 5th, 2005, by Rich.
I’m hoping to spend some time over the next ‘n’ weeks understanding the data generated from the mynicemailat domain, though I’m a bit busy with real experiments at the moment, so I intend to do it by thinking aloud here as I get the opportunity.
First pass
I’ve quickly run off a couple of basic queries to get things going. All figures here are measured after search bots and referral and comment spammers have been removed from the data, and they’re based on the live log data that StatTraq gives me.
Total times the mynicemailat site was hit: 1729
Distinct IP addresses visiting mynicemailat.com : 1198
Total number of readers who arrived there by clicking on a spam comment: 1123
The gap between 1123 and 1198 is made up by people who arrived from search engines, and webmail providers.
So in terms of raw traffic, the amount generated was negligible, but, even with this small change, my Alexa traffic rank for this site briefly went into the 100,000’s, for about a week. It’s returned to the 500,000 mark now. What this shows is that my day-to-day visitors tend not to be users of the Alexa toolbar.
Questions
Please leave your analysis questions and suggestions here, and I’ll see what I can do.
November 8th, 2005 at 9:35 pm
I can notice Google finds about 1,140 pages linking to the spamming site:
http://www.google.com/search?q=link%3Amynicemailat.com
That would mean each spam comment gave “you” about one reader. This is a very interesting information. That means even if the best CAPTCHA barrier can be skipped using a real human to enter the asked code, that becomes extremly expensive compared to the hit ratio.
I consider a spammer can hope to interest about 0,1% of its readers (this is a personal estimation based only on my own personal feelings, not any real data), so that whole spamming week would only made only 1 visitors to register on that site?! Is spamming really worth all that? Aren’t standard marketing ways more efficient? Doesn’t that mean spamming is a wrong way to find new clients?