Cheaters and the tragedy of the commons
Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on January 17, 2008
In this MediaPost article, Loren McDonald criticizes those that "cheat" at email marketing in the interests of making better numbers this quarter.His argument -- which I support -- is that cheating erodes trust in commercial email and is likely to attract the wrong sort of public interest. So he calls for more industry self-regulation.
Email marketers are lucky to have people like Loren looking out for their interests. But I'm not hopeful that his call will be heeded.
Loren uses a baseball metaphor to make his point. Let me use a well-known natural resources one to explain mine.
Fish stocks can only support a certain number of fishing vessels. Beyond that, the stocks diminish too fast and eventually disappear.
If hundreds of fishing companies have access to those stocks, it's in their collective interest as an industry to keep the number of vessels or catches limited...to respect that resource.
But it's in their individual interests to do exactly the opposite. Why?
Because the immediate benefit of sending out another vessel or bringing home a bigger catch goes straight to the fishing company, but the negative impacts of doing so are shared out among all the fishing community.
Collectively, a big price is paid for that vessel's selfishness. But the price that vessel pays is lower than the quick profit gained from exceeding the limits imposed by some kind of industry self-regulation.
You can think of the mentality as "grabbing what you can while the going's good." Because if you play by the rules, your competitors won't.
The trouble is, of course, that it only takes a few to think like that and the resource is ruined. That's why you find governments intervening, setting things like fish quotas to prevent overfishing. In such scenarios, self-regulation rarely works.
You might know this economic phenomenon as the tragedy of the commons. And it applies to email if you think of email addresses or trust in commercial email as a finite, public resource. Too much abuse of those addresses or trust and the resource rapidly loses its value.
But misplaced self-interest inevitably leads to abusive email practices. And that's ignoring the spam fraternity, who are abusing the email resource more than anyone and who are by definition immune to any call for reasonable behavior. Ever tighter regulation and legislation seems almost inevitable.
So call me a misanthrope, but I don't see self-regulation as solving the problems of bad email practices. Though we should still try - the fewer cheaters around the better.
A stronger argument against abusive practices (and one Loren has also made elsewhere) is that cheating doesn't work in the long term.
As with steroid abuse (to borrow the baseball metaphor), short-term gain comes at the expense of long-term health problems. With email, it's the health of your email address list and deliverability reputation that suffers when you, for example, ignore permission marketing principles in the interest of a short-term sales boost.
As those controlling the email infrastructure build more and more accountability into the delivery process, the downsides of trying to game the system get bigger and arrive faster. And therein lies hope for the long-term future of legitimate commercial email. All power to authentication and reputation systems.
Tags: email marketing, tragedy of the commons, permission marketing
[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
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