Many spam emails market products to a wide audience even if the products will only appeal to 0.0001% of them. This percentage might seem too insignificant to be worth the efforts. However, Cyberoam estimates that 54 billion spam emails are sent every day. At least 45% of these emails are advertisements of controversial pharmaceutical products, such as non-prescription Viagra. In this context, it can be seen that the small percentage of recipients that actually get to interact with the spam email or make purchases are significant contributors of revenue to the spammers. Companies that sell these products will pay some commission to the spammers.

At times, spammers might use advertising codes from advertisement agency companies and get paid per impression. From the millions of people that they send the spam emails to, if a certain percentage of them opens the emails, the impressions will be counted and the spammers will get some money, even if the recipient does not buy any products.