There is a whole industry of folks who collect lists of names and addresses to sell to junk mailers. They've got lists of everything -- active seniors who have taken a cruise, newly licensed RNs, boat owners (selectable by length of boat). There are literally thousands of these lists. They're sometimes handy to find out how big a market is, or how many of a certain kind of business there are.
Mike and I were poking around Yelp to grok their model.
Mike: "So they got a DB of the restaurants from Acxiom or someone, made landing pages and collect community on them..."Rich: "What do they have in Google?"
Mike: "270k, doesn't seem like a lot, there's gotta be more restaurants than that."
Rich: "Google 'restaurant masterfile'"
Mike: "Restaurant Owners Masterfile, 385k restaurants, close..."
('Yelp' ... where did that name come from? Yet-another-listings-provider?.. But 'yelp' sounds better that 'yalp'...nah)
Paypal sure seems like it was a successful startup founder factory...
Comments (2)
If you just want summary information for market sizing data why wouldn't you just use the good old Census Bureau?
Of course this information is a a little out of date but it is in the ball park.
http://www.census.gov/econ/census02/data/us/US000_72.HTM
It puts the peak at 500k for the category but then breaks it out by type.
Posted by Jason | January 2, 2007 10:27 AM
Posted on January 2, 2007 10:27
SUCCESSFUL SPAMMERS ARE AN IMPORTANT PART OF THE FOOD CHAIN.
As much as Junk E-Mail drives you crazy, I must admit that I have changed my views a bit on the subject & in fact look forward to receiving the latest junk emails, for 2 reasons.
It’s not that I’m a glutton for punishment, as I am the CEO of a growing International business & hardly have time to scratch myself these days.
The first reason being that, after initially cursing all these Viagra merchants & Stock Broking tipsters, I realized that these guys that are successfully beating the sophisticated Spam filters, must be pretty clever & imaginative, so ought to be at least respected for having such talents, albeit, not of a popular variety.
Somewhere in the future evolution of the internet, it is likely that that these creative ‘bad’ guys will be able to take some credit for forcing the big players to develop more & more sophisticated Email software, that otherwise would never have been attempted to be made.
In the end the billions of email users around the globe will be able to enjoy a state of the art communication medium that has evolved over the years. ie. a perfected email system that cost billions of users, absolutely zero.
Oh, and the second reason, is that apart from all this theoretical stuff, I have watched & watched & learned the ways of the Spam experts. So now I am primed to try my hand at sending out a few million emails every week from a 200m Million mailing list I came across, from a disgruntled former Mail House employee.
I best not divulge what will be in my ‘refreshing’ bulk emails, but I can say that it is far more very interesting than the above & has something to do with a Flasher ! You will certainly know it, when you see it.
In the meantime, keep your eye on the new techniques that these guys employ & spare a thought for their ingenuity, as they do keep the ISP’s on their toes.
Alan Jorgo
Posted by Alan Jorg | January 21, 2007 5:14 AM
Posted on January 21, 2007 05:14