“Someone is going to go postal on the Geico gecko. Every week it seems another unsolicited solicitation from the insurance company best known for its Aussie-accented pitch-lizard appears in my mailbox along with stacks of credit card offers, catalogs, nonprofits’ pleas for money, fly-by-nights wanting to refinance my mortgage and reams of garish advertising flyers,” Todd Woody reports for Forbes.
“But now, instead of hauling a pile of paper directly from the mailbox to the recycling bin, I pull out my iPhone and fire up a new app called MailStop [free]. I snap a photo of the Geico envelope, tap the screen and beam it to Catalog Choice, a Berkeley, Calif. startup that then notifies the advertising-crazed insurer to take me off its mailing list,” Woody reports. “Within a few minutes I’ve performed a digital jujitsu on the junk mail in my mailbox. In other words, all the mail in my mailbox.”
Woody reports, “The $51 billion direct mail industry and the U.S. Postal Service are about to get disrupted, Silicon Valley-style. The 22.5 million stop requests Catalog Choice has processed over the past five years are a mere scrap of the some 85 billion pieces of junk mail that landed in American mailboxes in 2011. But that pace could dramatically pick up as junk mail- blocking apps from Catalog Choice and competitors like PaperKarma begin to seed smart phones.”
Read more in the full article here.
how does the company make money?
from ads.
Yeah, so you’ll see the Geico ad while you’re canceling the Geico snail mail. Then you’ll start receiving Geico emails.
By selling your contact info to advertisers?
Capitalism’s perpetual motion machine! Brilliant! 🙂
‘Aussie-accented pitch-lizard’.
WRONG! It’s a cockney accent. Cockney= being born within the sound of Bow Bells in London, England.
Most Americans can’t tell Aussie from English. I’m English, and I’ll bet I can identify regional American accents better than Americans can English, and I can spot Canadian from American and Aussie from Kiwi, but then we have several dozen regional accents of our own.
Congratulations! That talent and 50# (3 stone, 8 lbs.) of “tin” cans will get you a spot of tea.
You can say that again! I was in the Royal Navy with a Geordie – it was two weeks before I knew what on earth he was saying. “Wore Jack-ies gan yem”.
Bet you wouldn’t do worth a darn at ebonics.
… that will tell MDN that their FaceBook ads are “broken” and that I’m getting rather sick and tired of clicking “Cancel” – twice, usually – to get the error windows out of the way so I can read the content? The ads from Zagg, Parallels and the like are much less annoying – I can just ignore them – but the FacelessBook ads provide no content – and no revenue – and merely annoy.
adblocker and Pith Helmet = no ads
… as in ignore, most ads. My concern is anything that actually interrupts my “process”. In this case, browsing the site. Having to deal with an Error Box (pop-up) before I can proceed is quite disruptive.
Here’s how to kill a large fraction of junk snail mail: triple the cost of sending it.
The USPS is losing money (supposedly).
No one likes to get 80% junk and 20% real mail. (My *approximate* average over a few months.)
If raising the price of sending junk mail by a factor of three killed off 2/3 of the junk mail then the USPS would come out ahead with less mail to process and the same income. People receiving junk mail would get 2/3 less.
Everyone is happy except the junk mail advertisers themselves.
I don;t disagree with you. However, there would be paper, printing, and advertising company employees that would also be upset and out of a job.
The USPS makes a profit on 1st Class mail and package delivery- where they lose money is on selling below cost junk mail for volume. UPS and FedEx both operate programs that use the USPS for the last mile delivery of packages they have moved close to the final destination.
Um, no. The USPS actually loses money on first class mail. The junk mail is MUCH more profitable, it actually helps subsidize first class.
according to this..
Click to access RARC-WP-12-002.pdf
The USPS makes 48% of the revenue from bulk mail, 46% 1st class..
But yes ups FedEx etc do drop ship the cheap stuff for the USPS to deliver.
Should tell you something about their prices though… (ups/FedEx)
Get real Shadowself, don’t you realize it’s the Post Office!
It’s not their money.
” It’s not their money.”
I don’t understand this comment – the USPS has not directly received taxpayer-dollars since the early 1980s.
Not ‘directly’. It’s the unions – they take every thing down to the lowest denominator.
Lowest common denominator: Sounds like rush & his legion of lackeys.
BTW, UPS isn’t going broke, and they are a UNION shop. Teamsters. They work hard. So much for your theory …
Riiiiiight.
It’s the unions. Damn them!
All they allow for is competitive bargaining against corporations that would just as soon flay you alive. They’re evil – kill ’em all!
junk mail is the only really keeping the USPS in business. You take away all the junk mail, they’re dead