Wired discovers that an exposed log file for a ‘penis enlargement pill vendor’ showed that they made $600,000 in one month.
Email is a perfect example of the nothing is for free principle. If email cost 1c to send as Evan Williams suggested then spam would be less of a problem. Perhaps in any free network where there is implicit economic value then cost emerges. In the case of Email, the cost of marketing is so low that an undirected shotgun approach is viable. On the receiving end, the effort, and therefore cost, associated with spam filtering make Email like watching a TV channel where the viewer instead of the advertiser has to pay for the commercials.