Ever wonder why spammers always seem to stick to the same few topics? Sex, real estate, prescription drugs and gambling seem to be the ones that I see the most. The answer, as always, comes back to money.
A quick look at 7Search.coms top 100 paying keywords at http://7search.com/scripts/searchterms/top_paying.asp?n=100 will give you a quick idea on why spammers stick to their topics.
At the time of this writing the top keyword is ‘online casino’ paying out $5.04 a click. In fact the top 55 keywords are all about gambling. We then get into real estate and home loan related keywords mixed in with the casino words.
A quick look over at overture puts the payout for ‘online casino’ at just over $3 and the google adwords stats are even larger than that.
So if you accidentally click on one of the links inside of a spam message it is possible that you will earn a spammer typically as much as half of that, or possible $2.50 or more per click.
If we get 100 people to perform the action (remember our 1%/1% rule) on each spam message and the only action they have to do is click then a spammer could potentially earn $250 per spam batch they send out.
Bottom line, do a google search on the topic if you really want to know, but if you don’t want spam anymore stop clicking on their links.