This site has taken ridicule for posting questions like, "what is the carbon footprint on spam?" It began as a point in a slide deck created for the Association for Certified Green Technology Audit, and was carried further in the now well known series for Green GRC.  In fact, I have personally offered FREE Green IT services for since 2007, extending the mantra "commit to measure", only to have clients, employers and even friends tell me, "This is not important to our audit committee.  No one is gong to pay for Green IT."

While attending the Churchill Club in 2009, I got to meet McAfee's new CEO Dave DeWalt.  I stood in line until every last attendee had left so I could deliver three very important comments.

1. To say Thank You for supporting President Obama's Cyber Security for the 44th Presidency initiative, and for putting the McAfee rules engine into the cloud.
2. To ask if McAfee had any intention to measure the carbon footprint of spam?
3. To let Dave DeWalt know that he is my "Johnny Depp" (so now he might remember me.)

EnterpriseGRC Solutions has been on a seven year campaign to associate security with green. It began in 2005 when we were Phoenix Business and Systems Process and we engaged in legal opposition for "Parking" sites.  Finally, this anthem seems to be taking some hold, but not enough.

In the months of November, December and January it was pointed out to our readers that when we removed spam user registration, our site rank dropped. This means, we have no incentive to remove known spammers.  Allowing bots and malware has potential marketing benefit, if you are evil and stupid.

During February and March, articles identified sites that perplexed and amazed, indicating enterprisegrc.com value as anywhere from 15 thousand dollars to just shy of 100 thousand.  There's a lot of content here, but be real. This is a small business site showing materials that range from ten years to a week old.  We might be good, but not that good.

In the last week, there's been a huge change in world web traffic.  It's gone down. Here's some interesting observations.

• Google is down but is still the highest ranked site in the world.  - .014%
• Number two ranked site, Facebook is down. -.02%
• YouTube and Yahoo are down, -.092%
• Baidue, rated 1 in all of China is down -2.1%
• Wikipedia was down (although is back up) by -.9%
• Twitter is down -.6%
• Windows Live.com was down -2.6%
• China's number two site QQ.com was down yesterday -6%!!  That's right, whole number, six percent.
• Amazon's three month average is down -7.76%, and again, those are whole numbers.

These are percentages of traffic spanning 4.5 billion pages from over 16 million sites.

The impact of leveling black hat SEO has been mainly in reducing spam.

If traffic is really equal to revenue, consider who had the most to lose.  According to SiteWorthChecker.com, these are the values for the top sites as of 9AM today.

• google.com $ 2.19 Billion USD
• facebook.com $ 1.101 Billion USD
• youtube.com $ 736.21 Million USD
• yahoo.com $ 553.38 Million USD
• baidu.com $ 443.47 Million USD
• wikipedia.org $ 370.07 Million USD
• live.com $ 317.58 Million USD
• blogspot.com $ 278.17 Million USD
• twitter.com $ 247.49 Million USD
• qq.com $ 222.92 Million USD

It is true that small business is largely furious about our drop in rank, but the conversation noise I don't hear is about incredible improvement in reducing wasted bandwidth and other power resources.  No one is really speaking up about the quality of businesses that were also slowed down.  Do we have a plan to keep that traffic turned off?  Is it just going to rush back under the floorboards and resurface in about a week? Can we fumigate now?

We need to align traffic to readers.  When spam is the cause for the elevated traffic, a drop in that rank is not a drop in business effectiveness.

We wonder how long it will take these numbers to adjust as a relative index?  If the total volume of activity is dropping in all of the top sites around the world, then our small business sites aren't really losing ground. We are actually, perhaps for the first in a good long time, gaining actual ground.

AdCrack^(TM) (noun): The product pushed to unsuspecting web site owners that promises to pay for readers who view advertisement banners, and also provides reader statistics to a third party.  AdCrack stands for Advertising Counterfeit Reader Access Customer Knowledge, which more specifically means that a site is harvested for customer data, found to have strong reader patterns and is broadcasted to other parties as a good location to use for the harvesting of reader data.

Used in a sentence; "I feel really stupid for accepting money to place this obvious AdCrack on my site.  I wish I didn't take money for this AdCrack because now I am addicted to it.  I know AdCrack is destroying my family, but I just can't stop."

Sites that place large amounts of pushed advertising are not having that activity monitored, and the impact in our world use of power and bandwidth is not understood.  We are pushing AdCrack.  The sites that promote AdCrack, (Advertising Counterfeit Reader Access Customer Knowledge) have been harvesting what they probably shouldn't know about our customers, and are sending a beacon to off shore and malicious users about the value as a site for traffic relay.  People who buy AdCrack are attracted to the allure of fake, elevated, CRAP, Counterfeit Reader Access Performance.  We are a society of wigs, corsets, push up bras and botox, oh, and AdCrack.

To put this in more human terms, AdCrack is not attracting the type of readers who want to date you.  They want to rape you.

As for everyone feeling a little blue right now, heavy sigh, "They never write.  They never call..."  Perhaps it's more important to remember, they never knew your name.

So let's breath a drop of cleaner air and take time to focus on our real readers.

"And now, something you'll really enjoy."

Rocky

Please do download and read the McAfee Report titled "What is the Carbon Footprint of Spam?"

Even though they don't remember that we asked for the report, or note that EnterpriseGRC Solutions has been writing about this for the last year, we're so glad to be reading it.  Dave DeWalt is still our Johnny Depp!!! This is what socially responsible corporate spending is all about.

Here are some report outtakes, but please quote McAfee on this.  They've obviously invested a lot of talent and resource to bring us the information.

Key Findings

The Carbon Footprint of Email Spam Report

• The average spam email causes emissions equivalent to 0.3 grams of carbon dioxide (CO2) per message
• Globally, annual spam energy use totals 33 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh), or 33 terawatt hours (TWh). That’s equivalent to the electricity used in 2.4 million homes, with the same GHG emissions as 3.1 million passenger cars using two billion U.S. gallons of gasoline.
• Spam filtering saves 135 TWh of electricity per year. That’s equivalent to 13 million cars off the road
• If every inbox were protected by a state-of the-art spam filter, organizations and individuals could reduce today’s spam energy by 75 percent or 25 TWh per year. That’s like taking 2.3 million cars off the road.
• The average greenhouse gas (GHG) emission associated with a single spam message is 0.3 grams of CO2. That’s like driving three feet (1 meter), but when multiplied by the annual volume of spam, it’s like driving around the Earth 1.6 million times.
• A year’s email at a typical medium-sized business uses 50,000 kWh; more than one fifth of that annual use can be associated with spam
• Filtering spam is beneficial, but fighting spam at the source is even better.  When McColo, a major source of online spam, was taken offline in late 2008, the energy saved in the ensuing lull, before spammers rebuilt their sending capacity, equated to taking 2.2 million cars off the road.
• Much of the energy consumption associated with spam (nearly 80 percent) comes from end users deleting spam and searching for legitimate email (false positives). Spam filtering accounts for just 16 percent of spam-related energy use.

The Carbon Footprint of Email Spam Report

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