Huge potential here: What was the total dollar cost, measured in loss of economic productivity, of Americans deleting spam last year?
The correct answer is:
$21.6B
Spam is an unfortunate fact of life for e-mail users today. According to the "2004 National Technology Readiness Survey,” conducted by Rockbridge Associates, Inc. and the Center for Excellence in Service at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, which tracks “key behaviors related to the internet and e-commerce,” 78% of online adults receive unsolicited e-mail on a daily basis and 36% of online adults receive at least ten individual pieces of spam each day.
On average, each person also spends just under three minutes each day deleting these e-mails. Based on census figures which estimate 169 million online adults in America, the collective time spent by Americans deleting spam is substantial: annually, this activity accounts for 1.2 billion hours of lost productivity. Multiplied by the average hourly wage, that figure can be quantified as 21.6 billion dollars worth of time wasted. According to the study, this dollar figure only conservatively measures the negative economic impact of spam “because it does not count the wasted resources used to transmit spam, the cost to ISPs to manage and protect customers from spam, and the money spent by consumers on spam blocking software.”
If nothing else, the nearly billion dollars in estimated loss of productivity clearly demonstrates the potential economic benefit of public and private-sector efforts to curb the tide of excessive junk e-mail. Yet spam is not likely to go away any time soon: The study found that 14% of adults will “open their spam to see what it says, as opposed to simply checking to see if it is something they should delete” and during the last year 4% (around 5 million people) actually purchased the product or service advertised within. Since sending spam to large amounts of people is cheap (there are no stamps or other per-message fees for e-mails so the unit cost is very low) that’s enough to make it a profitable enterprise.
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