Spam clock tracks junk online.

• Position: WEB - Brief article

Every hour, 1 million new spam pages are created, according to the "spare clock" (www.spamclock.com). The online clock, launched by search engine Blekko, tracks how many junk pages are created on the Internet every second. In the first six weeks of 2011, nearly 1 billion spam pages were created on the web. It's estimated that 90% of e-mail traffic on the Internet is spare. Imagine what surfing the Internet would be like if 90% of all web pages were advertising.

"What happened to e-mail was the result of very powerful economics," Blekko Founder Rich Skrenta explains. "Spammers and con artists discovered they could reach a massive audience for pennies. And this scale of audience essentially guaranteed a very small but profitable return. Today the economic incentives for web spammers are even more lucrative than e-mail spam...