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Links: Spam Responsible for Sex Pill Success
Posted by Steven Wu on Friday, July 04 @ 00:25:32 EDT Oddities
The New York Times has a surprisingly lengthy article on how the use of spam has spurred an amazing growth industry in spurious penis enlargement pills. Some excerpts:
Carrying medically impossible promises, a few million bottles of the pills are sold annually by at least 50 companies, according to pill makers and dealers, producing revenue of more than $100 million a year for the so-called male enhancement industry. . . .

"Unfortunately, spam is a cheap game to get into," said Michael Clark, managing partner of Herbal Partners, which sells more than 300,000 bottles a year of Herbal Vigor pills, largely through affiliates. A marketer, he said, could arrange to send millions of spam messages a day through a computer in Eastern Europe for $1,500 to $3,000 a month. And a list containing 10 million e-mail addresses can cost just a few hundred dollars.

"That means you only need to take in $150 a day to break even," Mr. Clark said. "If you can send out 10 million e-mails a day from your bedroom, and you make $50 a bottle, you can make a decent profit."

. . . Mr. Richter said the biggest spammers take in $5,000 to $10,000 a day selling penis pills. . . .

With the pill messages, "guys delete it and delete it and at some point, they start to wonder."

. . . [T]he biggest reason complaints are so rare may be the desire to avoid embarrassment.

"Who is going to take a penis pill maker to court," asked Kevin Blatt, a former marketing executive at HerbalO, "and go in front of a jury of their peers to say, `I bought a bottle of pills to enlarge my penis and they didn't work?' "

Read the article here.
 
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