• by Paul Gough , December 12, 2003

Despite lingering concerns about spam and legislation designed to fight it, email marketing is still pretty popular.

DoubleClick President/Chief Executive Officer Kevin Ryan estimated his company's piece of email marketing at about $40 million annually, with costs coming down and it becoming a profitable part of DoubleClick's business.

"That will grow next year pretty nicely," Ryan said at Wednesday's Credit Suisse First Boston Media and Technology Week Conference in New York City.

He said that the market is still somewhat fragmented, just like ad serving was a few years ago. But the players are winnowing down.

Ryan said that recent efforts in Congress and state legislatures to eliminate spam are a mixed bag.

"I'm not as optimistic that legislation is going to have a huge impact, because legislation is OK, [but] enforcement is really what makes it happen, and I'm not convinced that we're going to enforce any anti-spam legislation out there with actual people going to jail, for example," Ryan said.

He said that there's been a lot of progress in technology to fight spam and that within a year an individual or company will be able to buy a software package that will cut spam.

-- Paul J. Gough