About one-third of U.K. mobile users don't seem to mind receiving spam on their phone, according to a recently published report. And a surprisingly high 11% bought products as a result of receiving
spam.
Nearly two-thirds of mobile users are fed up with mobile phone spam, found the survey, which was commissioned by marketing
company Pontis. 70% of those surveyed found mobile marketing campaigns totally irrelevant to them.
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According to Pontis, mobile operators are "failing to capture the imagination of the baby boomer generation," although the
survey shows that younger people, from teenagers to 34-year-olds, are almost as irritated by mobile spam, at 72%. Within this
same age group, 47% of mobile users were willing to change operators as a result. The survey was conducted by GfK NOP over
the telephone between 20-22 July. 752 mobile phone users aged 16+ were interviewed in the U.K. across a range of ages, said
Pontis.
This is roughly in-line with people's attitudes towards earthbound e-mail spam, which have changed in recent years. A survey,
commissioned by TACD and produced by European Research into Consumer Affairs in 2003, found that a full 95% of users said
that either they hated spam or that it annoyed them.
However, a survey published in May 2007 by Pew Internet found that, while users are receiving more spam, it bothers them less.
It found that: "Users also report less exposure to pornographic spam, which to many people is the most offensive type of unsolicited
e-mail. Spam has not become a significant deterrent to the use of e-mail, as some observers speculated it might when unsolicited
e-mail first began flooding users' in-boxes several years ago."
The Pew Internet survey is conducted annually and confirmed that spam is now less of an irritant: "Fewer users said spam has
made using email unpleasant or annoying: 63% in this survey, down from 67% in 2005, 77 percent in 2004, and 71% in 2003."
The reasons are that there's less pornographic spam today, that users are more accustomed to dealing with it, and that they
have methodologies and technologies to manage it.
