The Web, Spam and the Recession

Aside from the Spanish Prisoner/Nigerian 419 scams, which are entertaining only in the extent of their variety – I love a well-crafted story – spam now seems to divide fairly equally between Sex and Pharmaceuticals, with the Viagra and Cialis ads qualifying as both. The “comment spam” that hits this blog divides pretty evenly between the two as well. If you’re not familiar with comment spam, it’s automated posting spiders adding comments to your web site that include links to their web sites, which are usually peddling porn and/or pharmaceuticals.

I have an Akismet plug-in that catches all such postings, mostly by spotting that the comments have links in. It’s very effective as the number of false negatives and false positives are very low. As the occasional legitimate comment does have links in it, I scan through the Akismet “spam bucket” every few days to rescue any false positives. On average there are about 35 spam comments posted per day, so the situation is a little like email where the illegitimate outnumbers the legitimate.

The point of this posting is to call attention to a relatively new phenomenon that has been probably been provoked by the recession. Both my comment spam and email spam now incudes a certain amount of eTail spam. It doesn’t cause me any particular pain – the Mac Mail spam filter works fine for me and so does Akismet on this blog – but I guess it’s a sign of the times.

Here’s a tentative long range forecast:

The web is going to be the business dynamic that pulls us out for the recession.

The logic behind this is simple (although it may be wrong). Of course, the web isn’t a business sector, as such, but the agglomeration of pretty much every other business sector, except arms, construction, mining and heavy engineering – all of which are pretty difficult to carry out over the web. The businesses that prosper in a recession are those that can deliver clear value-for-money (vfm) and that will happen through the web because the transaction costs are lower. There are several points to note:

• Consumers who previously used the web on an occasional basis will become regular users for the sake of vfm.
• eTailer and other dot com denizens will focus on vfm through the web.
• Web advertising will continue to flourish, despite current negative prophesies, because it offers the best vfm in advertising. This will itself reinforce the momentum of the web.
• The as-a-service movement has only just begun. This will lead to much more ambitious as-a-service business models well beyond software as a service/
• The web continues to evolve and will soon threaten the cable companies as it starts to become the dominant medium for entertainment.
• Web 3.0 (the semantic web) will soon be on us improving the web in a dramatic way (watch this space).

Although it is rarely referre to now, one of the dominant and counter recessionary businesses of the Great Depression was typewriters. It was a productivity/vfm thing.