All The Spam In The World Makes $200m, Costs Us $20b

All The Spam In The World Makes $200m, Costs Us $20b


We all hate spam. But we figure it must be worth it to someone since there’s so damn much of it. But… apparently not. A new paper from the Journal of Economic Perspectives estimates it brings in a total of $US200 million in revenue worldwide per year. And then the rest of us spend $US20 billion cleaning it up. Ugh.

How is that possible? Well, it’s insanely cheap to send spam. The paper suggests that things like raising the cost of payment processing would have a dramatic effect on spammers’ overhead and would probably be more effective than, say, government intervention. [Journal of Economic Perspectives via The Atlantic]


The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

It’s the most popular NBN speed in Australia for a reason. Here are the cheapest plans available.

At Gizmodo, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.