Greetings from Uninterested Person

I miss Blue Frog...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Frog

I was never a spammer, but I worked a datacenter and had frank conversations with former customers who were terminated when they were found to be spamming on the network.

Yes. Yes it pays. Quit a lot and quite easily.

Some quick figures. The average server purchased can send (extremely conservatively) 5-10 emails a second. If you assume that they will be caught within 48 hours after setup, that means that between 864,000 and 1,728,000 emails can be sent out in that time. Rough cost expended - $150 for server setup and $20 for an hour of your time setting it up (Most spammer I have come in contact with are not highly skilled, this hourly rate is my own guess if I would hire them). That means it costs about $1 to sent between 5,080-10,165 emails. The going response rate in my experience of talking to them is about 0.02%. Which means they are getting about one or two people for every dollar expended.

Sell fake viagra for $5 a pop, you just turned a very nice profit.

Again, all of these totals are low-end averages based on spammers I spoke with. They were not Leo Kuvayev or Alex Blood.

of course it works! no one would expend the significant time and resources that are required to spam effectively these days if there wasn't any reward. It's a numbers game, they just blast their ads (which are generally for high profit margin things that appeal to people in a desperate/impulsive mental state: penis pills, forex, get rich quick schemes etc) to as many people as possible, if you hit 100 million email addresses, and 1% of them get through spam filters, i'd bet you'd get more than one conversion.