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At this point, however, no marketers are using boxbe for e-mail campaigns because the audience is too small to be useful, Loder says, although there has been some interest. He hopes to gather many more users during the next four months--enough to start reaching out to mainstream marketers. "The real sweet spot will be one million users," he says. "At that point the marketers will come to us."
Acquiring a critical mass of users, however, may be the biggest challenge that boxbe will need to overcome, says Hal Varian, professor of business, economics, and information management at the University of California, Berkeley. "If a pay-to-send service like boxbe were universally deployed, it would likely be a successful way to fight spam," he says. "But it's hard for a single company to get the critical mass, since existing companies that provide e-mail services are unlikely to acquiesce to a new firm getting between them and their users."
MacKie-Mason of the University of Michigan says that the service might be confusing to those who are less technologically savvy. However, at some point, the initial hassle of keeping track of a white list could be mitigated by being spared the masses of unwanted e-mail, MacKie-Mason says. "It may be that an e-mail world where we have to maintain a white list is better than a world flooded with spam."
According to Loder, e-mail advertising is an underused marketing tool. "People spend 50 percent of their time online using e-mail," he says. "But the amount of money spent to reach people over e-mail is a little over two percent of [the budget for] online advertisements. It's because legitimate advertisers don't want to be perceived as spammers." If boxbe catches on, he says, e-mail advertising could lose its stigma.
When people start creating dummy addresses they never check, just to get cash flow? Anyone done projections of how that will devalue the advertising worth?
Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
rvaessen
1 Comment
Challenge response
Cool! This is the first time I've seen a free challenge response email service. These people are giving away free CR accounts, and if a spammer wants to pay to push his email into my inbox, they extract a fee and pay me! I'm currently getting plenty of spam, but it doesn't usually come with 'gravy'. This certainly sounds tasty. If nothing else, I might get some cash along with my spam. I plan to give it a try. I'll use a disposable address so I can bail in the event of any shenanigans.
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