Here’s an article that guesses (and if you read the article, you’ll agree it’s a pretty wild-ass guess) that the Internet costs $100 billion per yearto run.
Assuming that the entire structure of the Interent were dedicated only to sending and receiving email, that would put the cost of each email at about 1.1 cents. Of course, most Internet resources are being used to send other types of data, illegal music files, porn, play role-playing games, etc., so that email accounts for only a tiny fraction. Let’s be generous and say email represents ten percent of total volume, so the draw on fixed resources comes down to a little more than .1 (one-tenth) cent per message.
Obviously, we can deduce that the hardware costs aren’t really worth mentioning. But what about worker productivity?
Now, let’s assume the company-wide email is going to an average U.S. business with 16.1 employees. (Remember, the typical U.S. business is a “small business”) and each employee spends one minute opening, reading and deciding whether to act on or throw out the message. Let’s say all those employees are making $32,140 per year or $15.45 per hour.
We could also charge the boss’ time for writing the email, but I’m guessing that information has to be delivered to at least one person by some method, and the time spent in writing the email would be spent delivering the message anyway.
So by my extremely back-of-the-envelope calculations, each email costs 25.7 cents per employee. Of course, you then have to subtract the cost of emails that you actually find useful (“Good news! We can all leave at 3:00 on Friday!”) then decide whether the entire system improves or impedes productivity.
To late to edit: also consider the time it takes to distribute a memo and the cost to photocopy it, as well as the time sink that it would take to gather everyone together, deliver the information, keep the meeting going while one person asks irrelevant questions, and then have half the staff decide it doesn’t matter to them anyway.
Opt-out rates are irrelevant since most people (including me) don’t believe they have any effect (except to convince the sender that your address is live).
During the late '80s, when email was largely confined to universities, the Australian PTT was charging $1 a page (however they measured pages) for email since they saw it as a competitor to the postal system. Not that they were wrong, but it was a significant handicap to Australian researchers and, even then, bore no relation to cost. But I concur that the direct cost is negligible and probably unmeasurable.
What’s the cost of NOT sending email? Seems to me that you’d want to differentiate between “worthless” and “valuable” emails (obviously both are subjective labels and likely vary among recipients of the same email). Probably worthwhile to let your employees in on upcoming strategic changes or restructurings.
I feel like these sorts of soft analyses typically assume that everyone is already operating at 100% capacity, so whatever time is spent reading an email is simply lost for good (it reminds me of an article that claimed fantasy sports leagues cost firms $435mm PER WEEK in lost productivity…).