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The audience for radio broadcasting over the Internet has grown substantially in a very brief period of time. The phenomenon is similar to the rise of FM radio in the 1970s, says the 12th Arbitron/Edison Media Research Study of consumer use of Internet broadcasting. Key findings include:

– The estimated number of Americans who have used Internet broadcasts in the past month was 51 million people as of January 2004. Twenty-one percent of Americans say they have watched Internet audio or video in the past month, and 44% of Americans say they have tried Internet broadcasting at least once.

– In four years, the monthly Internet audio and video audience has doubled from 10% to 21% of all Americans, representing 51 million consumers. In January 2000, 10% of all Americans had watched Internet video or listened to Internet radio/audio in the last month. As of January 2004, 21% of all Americans watch or listen to Internet broadcasting monthly. Forty-two percent of the Internet audio audience say they have listened to Internet radio while shopping or researching a product/service online.

– Four in 10 Americans have tried Internet radio. Thirty-nine percent of Americans have ever listened to online broadcasts of over-the-air radio stations or stations available only on the Internet.

– In August 1998, only 18% of the entire population were even aware of Internet radio. As of January 2004, 16% of Americans say they have listened to Internet radio in the last month and 8% have listened in the past week. The monthly Internet radio audience represents approximately 38 million Americans, and the weekly audience represents nearly 19 million Americans.

– According to Arbitron, the vast majority of Internet radio is consumed during the workday. Since 2000, the average weekly time spent listening to Internet radio has averaged between five and six hours a week.

– The monthly Internet radio audience is eight times greater than that of the two satellite radio broadcasters combined. Currently, 2% of all Americans say they subscribe to either Sirius or XM, the nation’s two satellite paid-subscription radio services.

– Fifty-two percent of monthly Internet broadcast consumers have purchased online in the last month versus only 28% for non monthly Internet broadcast consumers. Those who listen or watch Internet broadcasts also spend more money online. The monthly Internet broadcast audience spent an average of $720 in the last year compared to an average of $522 spent online among those who don’t watch or listen online.

– Forty-two percent of Internet audio listeners say they have listened to Internet radio while researching a product or service online, while more than one-quarter of Internet audio listeners (27%) listen to Internet radio while shopping and purchasing online.

– Monthly Internet broadcast consumers are more likely to be male (60%) while those Internet users who do not regularly stream are more likely to be female (56%). One-third of all online American men regularly consume Internet audio and video. The overall Internet broadcast segment is 26% of those online, but delivers a high concentration of persons in the 12- to 34-year-old demographic.

– Fifty-four percent of monthly Internet broadcast consumers have at least a college degree versus 42% for those who do not regularly consume streaming media. Fifty percent of monthly Internet broadcast consumers have an annual household income of $50K+ compared to 38% for the rest of Internet users. Seventeen percent of Internet broadcast consumers have an annual household income of $100K+ versus 9% for the remaining Internet audience.

Email Marketing Spending to Reach $6 Billion in 2008

JupiterResearch announced that spending on e-mail marketing in the U.S. will rise from $2.1 billion in 2003 to $6.1 billion in 2008. The report finds that the dramatic cost reductions of e-mail marketing, the growth of sponsored and acquisition e-mail campaigns and the ever-increasing challenges presented by spam, are the critical factors driving the market.

The report finds customer retention e-mail campaigns accounting for the greatest share of non-spam e-mail marketing spending, and will continue to do so over the near-term. Strong spending on retention is driven by the dramatic cost effectiveness of e-mail as compared to postal direct mail.

David Daniels, a research director at JupiterResearch, suggests that marketers must manage their campaigns with skill to obtain the full benefits of online direct marketing. “Smart marketers have to manage their lists, test mailings against control groups and adopt behavioral targeting to get the biggest payoff,” he said.

JupiterResearch forecasts that strong growth in spending for sponsored e-mail campaigns will continue as well, driven by rising CPM rates, increasing inventory, richer creative formats, and increased effectiveness resulting from more diligent targeting and testing. Acquisition e-mail marketing in the U.S. is also recovering, and will climb steadily from $720 million in 2003 to $1.8 billion in 2008.

According to the report, during 2003 the average U.S. online consumer received 3,920 unwanted commercial e-mail messages. This number will grow to reach an outrageous total of 6,395 by the end of 2008. However, contrary to popular belief, spam is not the greatest barrier to reaching consumers. Rather, it is the volume of messages sent by legitimate marketers.

Sponsored e-mail messages in the U.S. will grow at nearly twice the compound annual rate (19%) of total message volume (11%) between 2003 and 2008. In order to cut through the vast clutter of commercial messages, marketers should focus on timeliness and relevance over frequency in their e-mail messages to consumers, the report states.

Wired News: Spam-Busters Report Good News
DUBLIN — They’re the scourge of the electronic age — the modern-day equivalent of the 19th century snake-oil salesmen hawking their miracle cures, love potions and get-rich-quick schemes. Like the rain in Ireland, there seems no escape from the tide of spam, or junk e-mail flooding the Internet.

But operating from the backstreets of the Irish capital, a small team of spam-fighters says it’s winning the battle against unsolicited e-mail that costs big business billions of dollars a year.

During the European day, employees at spam-filtering company Brightmail are engaged in a war of attrition against the propagators of unwanted e-mail all over the world before passing the baton to colleagues in San Francisco.

Spam-filtering companies like Brightmail have their work cut out — figures show the amount of junk e-mail surpassed legitimate e-mail for the first time ever last year.

And, police say, organized crime gangs are using spam to defraud online banking customers and distribute computer viruses capable of taking over an unsuspecting computer user’s machine.

To this end, they were given a recent boost by news that four of the biggest U.S. e-mail providers had sued hundreds of online marketers under a new federal law that bans the worst kinds of spam e-mail. And, the legal clampdown will intensify in Europe in the coming months, industry officials say.

“A year ago people were scared that e-mail was going to stop being useful because the amount of spam was increasing so quickly but now it’s starting to come under control,” said Ken Schneider, Brightmail’s chief technology officer.

Brightmail filters 80 billion e-mails a month, blocks two billion spams a day and looks after 300 million e-mail boxes the world over.

Since setting up in 1998, it has filtered spam for some of the world’s most prominent service providers, ranging from telecoms giant AT&T, EarthLink and Microsoft’s MSN in the U.S. to BT Openworld and Demon Internet in Britain.

The Dublin office has been up and running for two years, with Brightmail taking advantage of the relatively low-cost base and highly-skilled workforce on offer in Ireland.

Part of the problem is deciding what does and doesn’t constitute spam, which Brightmail estimates makes up around 60 percent of all Internet e-mail.

“We all receive unsolicited messages on a daily basis from our boss asking us to do something,” said Schneider. “You might consider it unwanted e-mail but it’s not generally thought of as spam.”

The problem comes with unsolicited e-mail that is sent in bulk to random addresses with varying subject lines to disguise their true intent.

Brightmail has two million decoy e-mail accounts in existence that attract unsuspecting spam e-mail and forward it to Dublin for analysis.

Rules are then written about how to block particular types of spam and are sent out to Brightmail’s customers to halt spam attacks in their tracks.

“We prioritize our attacks and go after the biggest first,” said Schneider.

He estimated the number of spammers around the world to number under a thousand with many buying CDs containing millions of e-mail addresses they use to ply their trade.

“You find some people who deny it’s spam and tell you they bought the e-mail addresses and you have to explain to them that the recipients never agreed to receive it,” Schneider added.

by WebProNews | Staff Writer

“Today is a red-letter day for big-time spammers, and the letters they should remember from this day forward are ‘CAN-SPAM,’” said AOL Executive Vice President and General Counsel Randall Boe.

America Online, Earthlink, Microsoft and Yahoo! today jointly announced that their spam-prevention efforts have resulted in the filing of the first major industry lawsuits under 2003’s the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (CAN-SPAM). These are the first major industry lawsuits being filed under the new law.

CAN-SPAM, which went into effect on January 1st of this year, criminalizes specific tactics while providing new law enforcement tools to aid in preventing unwanted email.

“Congress gave [e-mail and Internet service providers] the necessary tools to pursue spammers with stiff penalties, and we in the industry didn’t waste a moment – moving with speed and resolve to take advantage of the new law,” Boe said. “Consumers should take note that the new law not only empowered us to help can the spam, but also to can the spammers as well — and we’ll do that, one spam kingpin at a time if necessary.”

Many infamous large-scale spammers are being targeted in the six lawsuits, which are being filed against hundreds of defendants. The complaints were spread across the United States and charge the defendants with sending a combined total of hundreds of millions of bulk e-mail messages.

Allegations include law violations such as deceptive solicitations, sending spam through open proxies (a common method used to disguise the sender’s point of origin), spoofing of “from” email addresses, absence of physical addresses in the email content, and the absence of an electronic unsubscribe option.

See what e-Business professionals are saying about CAN-SPAM on WebProWorld, your forum for e-Business news and information.

Wired News: ISP Files First Can-Spam Lawsuit
A California Internet service provider is putting the federal Can-Spam Act to its first test, two months after the law passed, by filing a lawsuit against the owner of home-improvement website BobVila.com.

Hypertouch, based in Foster City, California, filed the suit on Thursday claiming the owner of BobVila.com and its marketing affiliate BlueStream Media violated provisions of the Can-Spam Act by sending out e-mail advertisements containing missing contact information. The suit claims that BlueStream Media forged the header information that can help e-mail recipients identify where a message originated.

Under the Can-Spam Act, which is the United States’ first nationwide attempt at reducing the amount of spam clogging the Internet, all e-mail advertisements must contain valid headers and contact information.

Critics of the act, however, contend that the law is too weak to have any serious effect and point out that it overrides stricter state laws against spam.

Hypertouch President Joe Wagner and attorney John Fallat said that they agree with the critics, but that the lawsuit was necessary to show that ISPs are not giving up in the fight against spam.

“We’re dealing with what we’ve got,” said Fallat. “We want to send a message to legitimate operators like BobVila.com that if they hire spammers, they will be responsible for spamming.”

Chris Bryan, a representative for BlueStream Media, said that his company had not yet been served with papers for the lawsuit, and that it would release a statement soon afterward. He said the allegations against his company were false. “We are complying with the Can-Spam Act,” he said.

Representatives for BVWebTies, which operates BobVila.com, did not immediately return calls on Friday.

Even if Hypertouch succeeds in its case, the message to spammers and the companies that hire them might not be loud enough to make a difference. The ISP is asking for $100 in damages — the maximum allowed by the Can-Spam Act — for each of the approximately 100 messages that it claims were sent by BlueStream Media.

Under California’s previous antispam law, plaintiffs in an antispam suit would have been able to ask for awards 10 times as large. Individuals, too, would have had the right to sue — not just ISPs and government authorities.

In addition to statutory damages, Hypertouch is also asking for an injunction to prevent BobVila.com and BlueStream Media from sending out further messages that contain false headers or are missing contact information.

Unless other ISPs file their own lawsuits claiming additional damages, such a penalty would amount to little more than a slap on the wrist and an admonition to “get it right” the next time.

This, says Fallat, is a problem that is not likely to change any time soon. “A lot of times, in response to public pressure, politicians rush out a law that isn’t very helpful,” he said.

Still, he hopes the lawsuit will inspire other ISPs to take a more active role in fighting spam.

Politicians “took away the private right of action, but they did give ISPs the right to sue,” said Fallat. “Will this stop spam? No. But at least we’ll shrink it, hopefully.”

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A new disease, “Internet Syndrome”, is beginning to appear in China. Doctors say more and more psychological conditions, that have Internet related causes, are being diagnosed. It appears that this is restricted mostly to teenagers and that addicts are suffering symptoms like delirium, paranoia and psychosis. Often the affected person has been spending over 6 hours a day on the Internet. A Doctor Yu Haiting, the vice president of the No. 8 People’s Hospital in Zhengzhou, told the Xinhauanet news agency that he sees over two cases a week: “He cites the case of a 19-year old who, after surfing the next for five to six hours everyday for five years who had come to believe that “invisible pairs of eyes in cyber-space were peeping at him and examining him all the time”. Yu explains that sufferers are typically having difficulties with social interaction in the real world, and turn to the Net to avoid conflict with friends and family. “To start with, they turn to the virtual world for comfort and gradually become more reluctant to face life,” he said. Dr. Yu advises that teenagers restrict time online to no more than 3 hours per day and that parents spend time talking with their children to encourage them to engage with the real world.” Quote courtesy of the Register. China has been seen to aproach the Internet with caution and recently passed legislation to prevent people under 18 from using cyber cafes. It is speculated that the publication of these “Internet Syndrome” cases may be an attempt to persuade the Chinese population not to use the Internet.

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