A requiem for ecards
The latest in my series mourning failed business models.
Remember back in the bubble era, when online greeting cards looked ready to make their paper cousins irrelevant, much as email had killed personal letters? Dancing, singing, tacky, tasteless ecards were so hot that zero-revenue startup BlueMountain.com sold for $780 million, all on the strength of its brand of ugly, annoying cards. Of course, when the bubble burst, buyer Excite unloaded the business for about $35 million. But the bubble isn’t what’s killing the ecard business today. In fact, post-bubble, ecards have continued to, well, bubble along. I still get a couple now and again from relatives who’ve missed the deadline to send a postal greeting. And many of today’s models are a vast improvement over the MIDI-laced, animated-GIF based cards of the 90s. So, why is the ecard era about to end? One word: Spam. As Bob Sullivan points out in a recent post:
Would-be spammers first send out fake greeting cards, which trick recipients into visiting Web pages that are booby-trapped with malicious software that allows visitors’ computers to be hijacked. Then those hijacked computers are turned into spam machines, and directed to send out attachment spam. The two-stage attacks are very effective.
So many fake greeting cards have flooded the Net that Sullivan is even recommending a blanket ban: “Don’t ever read electronic greeting cards. They have officially become more trouble than they are worth. If you think one might be authentic, and you just can’t resist, call the sender before opening it to make sure the card is real.” Sure, can you imagine that? “Hi, Uncle Joe. Did you really send me this ecard? Oh, and by the way, next time can you just send cash?”
While the spam-powered destruction of the ecard business may not bring tears to too many eyes (BlueMountain.com’s current owner, American Greetings, still makes its real money from paper cards), the broader implications aren’t pretty. After all, if spammers can bring down one industry so easily, what’s to stop them from doing the same by mimicking other online services? Indeed, as Sullivan points out, they’ve already moved on to sending PDF attachments. Will Adobe’s venerable format become the next victim? Or will email providers finally get serious about fighting spam and recognize that it’s not just a threat to BlueMountain or Adobe—it’s their business that’s on the line if they can’t find a way to beat the spammers.
