It’s a damned shame that spammers had to ruin email for everyone. Then again, I don’t know why the Internet should be any different than the material world. Mass mail marketing turned into junk mail. Telephone solicitation turned into the scourge called telemarketing. There are entire four-hour blocks of television programming comprised of nothing but infomercials. Every other page in every other magazine contains an advertisement. Bumper stickers. Bus benches. T-shirts. Tattooed foreheads. The whole world is a potential billboard. If we thought that email would somehow escape the exploitations of marketing, we were being naïve.
"The fatal flaw in advertising is when it crosses the line between enhancement and intrusion." |
My belief is that people don’t really hate advertising in and of itself. It’s not the commercials or the telemarketers or the spam that people hate. It’s the overkill. I think the average person understands the service that advertising provides to the consumer. Ads tell us what’s out there and help us to make choices before we buy. Anyone who watches the Super Bowl knows that sometimes the commercials are more entertaining than the big game. The fatal flaw in advertising is when it crosses the line between enhancement and intrusion.
I find it ironic that so many adult webmasters bitch about spam considering that most of us aren’t really pornographers. We’re advertisers.
There are those who literally and technically produce pornography. However, a great many more of us spend our working days advertising someone else’s pornography. As well, those who create the porn, run the paysites and affiliate programs still have to advertise their products. The web host has to advertise. The designers, billers and programmers have to advertise. All of us advertise and some of us do it via email.
The CAN SPAM Act was touted as a law that would finally end the overabundance of email advertising. In reality the law is just a set of rules that define what is legal vs. what is illegal when it comes to spamming.
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There are many ways the adult webmaster can use email to promote programs and products. One can reach hundreds of people through email. All one has to have is a list of addresses. The best procedure to obtain email addresses is to collect them through opt-in methods like the sign-up form for a newsletter or by consenting in a membership agreement from a paysite. Another good move is to buy an email list from a reputable provider.
Then we get to the less dubious ways webmasters snag email addresses. The worst method for getting email addresses is trolling for them either with a script, software or by hand. You’ve seen this in action when you receive spam simply because you posted your email address in your profile on a message board. There are the goobers who unleash a script on their webpage that will collect the email address of each visitor, without permission. And there are those who use software to scan WHOIS info for fresh marketing meat.
Somewhere in the middle -between righteous and smarmy- is the FFA page. A Free For All (FFA) link page is an auto-generated list of text links submitted by users. A user will join a particular FFA page and then will submit their own link to their website/service/product. These users hope that surfers will click their link as FFA pages still generate a lot of traffic. For the user, it’s a pretty hard way to sell something but for the FFA page owner, it’s a somewhat legitimate method for collecting email addresses. That is, if you apply the rules of CAN SPAM to an FFA page.
If you don’t follow the rules of CAN SPAM then it won’t matter how you got your email addresses. If you do follow CAN SPAM you’re probably still going to encounter hostility from some of your recipients. If someone reports you at worst, you risk prosecution under the law. More likely you’ll be added to a spam filtering database which isn’t much better.
Email marketing is a risky endeavor these days. Old Titmowse wants you to be careful out there. If you gotta email, do it right. Read the CAN SPAM rules and follow them. You can find the full text of the CAN SPAM Act by following these steps: