At 11:06 AM 2/15/97 -0800, Timothy C. May wrote:
>At 10:19 AM -0600 2/15/97, Roy M. Silvernail wrote:
>
>>I much prefer the plan where a potential mail correspondant includes an
>>e-cash dollar directly cashable by me. If I like the mail (and the
>>sender), I throw the dollar away and the sender goes on the approved
>>list. If not, I keep the dollar, and the sender goes on the twit list.
>>Paper junk mail costs an advertiser more than $1 per piece, so they'd
>>still be getting a bargain. And potentially, some receivers may throw
>>away the dollar and welcome the spam.
>
>The basic flaw in all of these schemes is that they are "top-down"
>solutions, imposed on the market for invented reasons.
There we must disagree. Not that "top-down" imposed solutions won't
generally work, I agree with that. Rather, I suggest that there are valid
and logical market-driven reasons that people, both buyers and sellers,
would want to adopt the system I've proposed.
The benefits for the recipient of the payment-containing spam/advertising
are obvious. He gets money. Admittedly it is less obvious why a seller
would want to pay for what he seemed to previously got for free, but that's
more-or-less the case. More in a moment.
[snip]
>However, just "making up" a fee--as Roy does here, and as Jim Bell and
>others have done before--is not a solution either. Nor does it stand any
>chance of being "enforced" (for a large number of reasons I won't get into
>here).
>--Tim May
Yes, the charge will be "enforced"...by the market! Here's how. "Spam" in
other media is termed "advertising" or "junk mail." And advertisers pay
good money for it, precisely because that it will drum up enough business to
not only pay for the ad rates, but also make some profit as well. They're
apparently correct, because those companies stay in business for years or
decades. Now, you'd probably imagine that businessmen would like to see
the cost of their advertising drop. Superficially, you'd be right, but in
reality if the cost of advertising on TV or radio or newspapers is an
essential element of the system.
To understand why, imagine that the price of such advertising dropped by a
factor of 100. Suddenly, anybody doing ads could do ten times as many, for
a tenth the total cost, or any such similar ratio. Or thousands of
companies whose products didn't previously profit enough for such ads would
now be able to do them, as well. The airwaves would be flooded. There
wouldn't be enough time for entertainment, or news, or much of anything
other than ads. Worse, since total advertising revenue would probably be
down by at least a factor of 25, even assuming "only" a 4x increase in ad
volume, there would be far less money available for producing good shows.
With fewer, worse shows, and many more ads, the average viewers would stay
away in droves. Pretty soon, the VALUE of that advertising to the
advertiser would drop...to 1/100 of what it was before.
The newspapers would, likewise, be flooded with ads. Even local newspapers
would look like the Sunday New York Times. And the current newspaper reader
might as well stay away, because it would be a rare page that actually
contained an article, and was not filled with ads.
Junk mail, if the TOTAL cost (paper, printing, labelling, mailing, etc)
dropped by a factor of 100, our mailboxes would be filled with paper three
times a day, maybe more often.
Well, actually this is not true. There are other effects which would limit
this progression. For example, as ad space went up, people would watch/read
less, so advertisers won't be motived to place ads even if they are free.
If junk mail was free, nobody would have the time to read most of it, and it
would go into the trash even faster than it does today. In effect, if
nothing else limited this advertising, our patience (or lack of it) would do
so. The _value_ of that advertising would drop to zero, along with its
cost. The end result, I argue, would be occasional low-value, sporadic
advertising that "nobody" reads and everybody hates.
Sound familiar? On the Internet, it's called, "spam."
Classic Internet-type spam is, essentially, a "zero-cost" ad. Not _exactly_
zero cost, but pretty close, at least in terms of bare cash outlay. What
limits Internet-spam is that if it's overdone (or, some would argue, done at
all!) an advertiser ends up pissing off the reader, making him even less
likely to purchase the goods or services the spammer/advertiser was
offering. At that point, in effect the cost of that advertising is
"infinite," because the outlay of zero money caused a _reduction_ in sales.
An advertiser can't force a customer to buy, and he knows it. But what he
wants is the customer's time and attention, even if there's no guarantee of
a sale. Really, what he wants is to buy the attention of a potential
customer, maybe only few a few seconds or a minute or so. That's what
advertising does. But like an ad in a newspaper or a commercial on TV
(which the target customer can ignore, mute, or walk away from) there is no
guarantee of contact.
So how, you'll ask, can the "free money with spam" deal be "enforced"?
Well, it can't, if your definition of "enforced" includes merely the idea of
some higher legal authority like a government or a trade organization or
something. But if you include the idea of the participants in the market,
themselves, "enforcing" such a payment, it can.
Let's suppose, for simplicity's sake, that we are considering two types of
advertisers. One has a product that few people want. Not NONE, just few.
It's either poor quality, or too expensive (compared to its perceived
value), or just not particularly interesting to the majority of the public.
The other has a product that far more people want. It's good, or is seen to
be inexpensive, or is interesting. Now, the former advertiser must put
out far more ads to make a given buck than the latter. The latter
advertiser wants and needs the attention of any given potential customer
more than the former, because the latter is far more likely to satisfy the
customer's curiosity and desires and be able to do business with him.
In short, the purveyor of products that more people want (products which are
more likely to interest the average potential advertisement reader...) can
AFFORD to pay a larger amount of money to a given ad-recipient than can the
other advertiser, the seller of junk. Logic suggests that in the
competition for "share of mind," the good-product seller would choose to
give a larger amount of money to any given ad-recipient, in order to attract
his attention and distinguish him from the other guy, if nothing else.
After all, that's the one thing HE CAN DO that the other guy, statistically,
cannot. He can say, in effect, "My ad is more important and intersting to
look at, and I can prove it by paying you more!" He is also saying that he
values you, as a customer, more than the guy who can only pay less.
Moreover, if I were a potential ad-reader, faced with the prospect of
reading "N" ads where "N" is a larger number than I really want to see,
presumably I would like to be able to pre-separate the ads into two groups,
the ones I'm more likely to want to read and the other pile. Even if I were
to totally ignore the fact that I'm more enriched by ads which contain a
larger payment (for example if that payment were to go (hypothetically) to a
charity of my choice) I should STILL recognize that it is more likely that
an interesting, useful ad would be able to afford a larger payment to
potential recipients. Therefore, logic suggests that absent any other
guide, I should spend my limited time reading preferentially reading the ads
where the advertiser was willing (and able) to make a larger payment.
Were a mail-reader program equipped with the ability to collect such
payments and change the ranking of ads, it seems logical to believe that one
of the most frequently-chosen options would be one which presented the
highest-paying ads FIRST, then the others in decending order of value.
There are multiple levels of self-interest at work here, reinforcing
themselves. First, in the short term, advertisers who pay more make you,
the customer, richer. But more importantly, if the customer preferentially
reads high-payment ads, over the medium-term the advertisers will tend to
get the idea and will raise their payments to whatever they feel they must
to get your attention. Further, in the long term giving more business to
advertisers who pay customers more will tend to strengthen those
advertisers, leading to their dominance in the industry.
In short, like Darwin's natural-selection concept, the idea of including
payments with unsolicited ads will simply take over. In fact, at some point
the concept of sending unsolicited product or service advertising (at least
on the Internet) WITHOUT including a gratuity will become as gauche as
exiting a restaurant without leaving a tip. At that point, the behavior of
millions of potential customers will, in effort, ENFORCE the practice,
because the vast majority of the public will simply ignore advertising by
rude, un-generous people.
Jim Bell
jimbell(a)pacifier.com
