Reports: Spam Costs $11.9 Billion; Users Favor Legal Ban

By Mitch Wagner

Three quarters of Internet users favor laws banning spam, which costs businesses $11.9 billion, according to separate reports.

Some 74 percent of Internet users favor a legal ban on spam, with only 12 percent opposing it and the remaining 14 percent uncertain, according to a Harris Interactive poll released on Friday.

Spam is costing $8.9 billion to U.S. corporations, $2.5 billion for European businesses and another $500 million for U.S. and European service providers, according to a separate study by Ferris Research, to be released next week.

Costs of spam include time spent deleting the messages, time spent by people duped into clicking on spam mess sages, and time spent tracking down legitimate messages mistakenly deleted by spam filters, the analysts said.

Figuring an average 4.4 seconds to deal with a message, that time adds up to $4 billion in lost productivity for U.S. businesses annually, Ferris Research said. Another $3.7 billion in costs are due to diverted staff time, along with companies having to buy more powerful servers and additional bandwidth. The rest is attributable to help-desk support for annoyed users. Costs are lower in Europe because spam isn't as big a problem there. Future studies may take into account costs of wireless spam, a growing problem in Europe as text messaging becomes more popular, Ferris Research said.

The Harris Interactive poll, taken with 2,221 Internet users ages 18 and older Nov. 22 to Dec. 2, found 80 percent of users saying they find spam very annoying, a huge increase from the 49 percent who felt that way two and a half years ago. Strong support for a legal spam ban crosses gender, color, ethnic and political party lines.

The most annoying messages were pornographic, financial and real estate related, Harris Interactive said.

The Harris Interactive poll contradicts a study released last month by the Pew Internet and American Life project, which found that Americans are not overwhelmed by e-mail and don't get much spam.

Other elements of online life have gotten less annoying for users, Harris Interactive said. The number of users who said they were very annoyed by how long it took for information to come up onscreen dropped from 25 percent of users to 17 percent. Likewise, the number of users annoyed by how long it takes to find websites has fallen from 20 percent to 10 percent.

But users are still experiencing about the same level of annoyance caused by inaccurate or unreliable information on the Web, with 32 percent saying they were very annoyed, compared with 35 percent in 2000. Also relatively unchanged was percentage of those who are very annoyed at the times when they need help from outside the home to make the system work properly: 21 percent now, compared with 18 percent two years ago.