June 9, 2004

Spam Costs Keep Rising For Business

I'm not sure what the costs are (see below for what one company estimates) but I do know that spam wastes so much time by forcing you to wade through, sort and delete junk email. But often spam is a source of viruses also.

Information Week is reporting that despite new laws and technologies, spam increasingly takes a toll on business coffers, costing employers $1,934 a year for each worker through loss of productivity, according to a study released Tuesday by Nucleus Research.
Nucleus, an advisory firm that specializes in return-on-investment research, considers its estimate conservative because it doesn't account for less-visible costs of spam, such as expenses related to IT personnel, software, hardware, and bandwidth hogged by spam. Also missing from its calculation: the negative impact of virus-triggered network outages on customer satisfaction or increased business exposure to harassment.

Though spam-filtering technologies have become more sophisticated, they haven't prevented workers from receiving more unwanted and unsolicited messages. On average, Nucleus says, users at companies with companywide spam filters received 20% less spam, suggesting ROI opportunities from the technologies. But last July, that figure stood at 26%. (full story)

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