Blogosphere 60 Times Larger than Three Years Ago

The blogosphere is doubling in size every six months and is now 60 times larger than it was three years ago, according to the latest quarterly installment of David Sifry’s “State of the Blogosphere” report, MarketingVox writes. He writes that Technorati now tracks over 35.3 Million blogs. On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day - more than 75,000 new blogs created every day. Technorati also tracks about 1.2 million new blog posts per day, or about 50,000 per hour.

AOL Blocks CertifiedEmail Critics’ Emails

AOL on Thursday apparently began bouncing emails containing the “Dearaol.com” URL - which is for a petition against AOL’s controversial certified-email program - according to nonprofit MoveOn.org (as well as the Electronic Frontier Foundation), CNET reports (via MarketingVox). Dearaol.com contains an open letter and a petition that calls on people to protest what it calls an “email tax” being imposed by AOL.

Direct Revenue Adware Shenanigans, Indirect Yahoo Funding Revealed

New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer’s recently filed suit against Direct Revenue has revealed some of the underhanded tactics and dealings of the adware company, reports Mediapost (via MarketingVox). Among the juicy tidbits of information to be revealed from copies of internal emails and memos found in the filings, which were posted on Ben Edelman’s website, is that Yahoo Search accounted for roughly $200,000 per month of revenue for Direct Revenue during April-June 2005, according to Mediapost.

Goodmail CEO: CertifiedEmail Not Meant to Decrease Spam

Goodmail CEO Richard Gingras told advocacy groups and legislators at a California Senate committee hearing last week that its fee-based CertifiedEmail program - which Yahoo and AOL are implementing - is about authentication, not reducing spam, DM News reports.

AOL Won’t Charge Nonprofits for Email Delivery

Confronted by a virtual mob of nonprofits brandishing the online equivalent of pitchforks and torches because of its plans to charge what they say is an “email tax” on those willing to pay in order to guarantee email delivery, AOL has apparently decided on a strategy of divide and conquer, writes MarketingVox. Silicon.com reports that AOL will not charge nonprofit organizations that send bulk emails to AOL members, offering two options to such groups. The first is AOL’s Enhanced Whitelist, which the company had said it would phase out but subsequently backtracked, saying it would retain it; messages would not be marked as “certified” but would be delivered for free.

Jupiter: Email Marketing to Grow, Spam to Drop

Email marketing spending will grow from $885 million in 2005 to $1.10 billion in 2010, and spam will drop drastically in that same period, according to a new report from JupiterResearch, B to B reports. The average email user saw 3,253 spam emails in 2005; that number will drop to 1,640 in 2010.

Big-Name Alliance Declares War on ‘Badware’

The Stop Badware Coalition, consisting of technology firms, academics and consumer advocates, is declaring war against malware with the launch of a website to help protect consumers and take the fight to companies that dupe online users into downloading spyware and unwanted adware, reports the Mercury News (via MarketingVOX). Harvard University’s Berkman Center and Oxford’s Internet Institute, together with Consumer Reports, have put the effort together. Google, Lenovo and Sun Microsystems are providing funding for the multimillion-dollar project.

FTC Reports that CAN-SPAM Working

An FTC progress report to Congress says that the CAN-SPAM Act is stopping the amount of spam reaching consumers, Brandweek reports. Officials also credit the improvements to e-mail providers’ beefed-up filtering technology, and consumers taking steps to ward off spam.

However, DMNews reports that the FTC has also found that today’s spammers are sending increasingly malicious spam.

The FTC also made public complaints and settlements involving allegations of spam as part of its new Operation Button Pusher initiative.

AvTech Direct Fined for Anti-Spam Violations

In Washington’s first lawsuit under the federal anti-spam act, AvTech Direct was ordered yesterday to pay $3 million in civil penalties and $375,000 restitution to the Seattle School District for sending 1,500 junk e-mails, The Seattle Times reports. The company was sued for sending unsolicited e-mails to employees of schools, hospitals and other nonprofit organizations. Each e-mail constituted a violation of the state Consumer Protection Act.

Permission-Based Email Blocking Still High

On average, 21 percent of permission-based emails did not reach the inbox during the first half of 2005 (relatively unchanged from the first half of last year) because they were either blocked or filtered into the junk folder, according to a new email deliverability study from Return Path, reports ClickZ (via MarketingVOX). Senders’ deliverability problems stemmed as much from their own practices (e.g., low list quality and number of complaints against the sender) as zealous blocking of emails by ISPs; blocking rates for individual mailers were as high as 54 percent.