Anyone who  spams from his  own machine (as  opposed to posting  to lists
hosted on other people's machines) is  going to incur either a tremendous
cost  for   delivering  the  spam  before   it  can  be  stopped,   or  a
non-negligible cost  for delivering the  spam in  a longer time  frame. A
$50k unix system with 256M and a  bunch of disks will do 300-400k/day. So
if they have 3M addresses their  hypothetical $50k machine is going to be
busy for about a week. Plenty of time to shut it off. Besides, as I found
out the hard way,  it takes 60 days to get any  kind of serious bandwidth
delivered to  your doorstep. So every  time they spam and  their provider
pulls the  plug, they're out of  business for two months.  And with setup
charges  in  the $3-5k  nonrefundable,  I'm  not  really sure  one  could
actually  make  money this  way.  In  other  words, unlike  the  SpamKing
approach, this isn't a working spamming method.
 
Anyway,  if I  understood  correctly they're  charging  people for  *web*
"impressions", ie every time someone  clicks on the Internet scanner GIF,
they make  $0.03 (or whatever  the rate might  be). I don't  see anything
wrong with  that, although I'm  quite confident  that it will  never work
out. Every week some new company writes to [log in to unmask] to explain
how they have looked at the web and seen that there was a lot of info but
only 19,999 companies trying to organize  that info, so they have decided
to become  #20,000 and if  we would only spend  15 min filling  out their
form they will add  us to their database where millions  of web users who
have no idea  that they even exist but could  putatively be imparted this
information by divine  nocturnal visit will be able to  find us. They all
act like they are going to  become THE ultimate source for finding things
on the web. I have yet to see one succeed :-)
 
  Eric