The most bizarre among the new resources is perhaps our eyeballs.
With the advent of the online advertisement industry, the
attention of users literally means money: Maintaining a website
with a lot of visitors means that the real estate of the pages is
worth a lot in ad contracts. Unfortunately, this is a powerful
incentive for devising all sorts of schemes for luring users and
More and more
value is projected
and created online
14 The Problem
enticing clicks at all costs, which brings us back to considering
the world from a criminal??™s perspective.
The mind-boggling scale of Internet activities allows schemes
based on the pure economy of scale to be pro?¬?table: Spammers
send their unsolicited commercial messages to literally millions
of recipients, and a risible percentage of clicks is enough to
bring the balance into the black. However, spamming is becoming
hard work; growing awareness of the phenomenon erodes
the already thin number of clicks, the arms race with antispam
software is getting tougher, the evolution of international laws is
shrinking the number of safe havens for spam ?¬?rms, and the
sheer resources implied in the process are a serious ?¬?xed cost.
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