One of the benefits of the Internet is democratization of publishing abilities. Another is the easy distribution of labor, examples are the SETI program as well as the current denial of service attacks in Wikileaks escalation. Amazon’s Mechanical Turks is an example of a network set up for precisely this reason.
A study by NYU faculty reveals, however, most of the work on Mechanical Turks is being used for spamming purposes. 40% of the new work requests are spam and not legitimate work requests. 30% of the work requests are from spammers seeking to outsource the labor, such as creating fake email addresses, fake Twitter accounts and fake advertisements.
Photo Credit: AllSpammedUp.com
There are a couple of lessons digital marketers can draw from this study. First, there is value in spam. That’s the good news. Even though it is annoying to the rest of the world, the benefits to being a spammer still cover the costs. Given the trend in people willing to spend money online we can expect spam to remain profitable. The second lesson is spam is out there in larger than imagined quantities and if it remains profitable then it will continue to dilute and tarnish digital advertising. Digital marketers need to distinguish themselves from spammers while at the same time trying to diminish spam from diluting what is that legitimate digital marketers do. At the least, digital marketers can cite the profitability of spam as proof that legitimate marketing is also profitable.
An example of the immediate risk from spammers is Amazon’s Mechanical Turks. If the spamming factory is not diminished then the entire network may be shut down. That would be a real loss of potential even outside of digital marketing.
Read Write Web: Mechanical Turk Spam
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