The following email from spammers & scammers indicates that the view of e-gold and Paypal is about the same - a round 400k each of addresses. I don't believe that there are that many e-gold active users out there, but it may be that their more heavy duty approach to financial transactions increases the punch of their lower numbers.
One of the great difficulties with these markets (decried frequently by superlative marketeers such as JPMay) is that there are no statistics on ... well, everything. It would be sad if we had to rely on the biased view of scammers to conduct our business. Still, worse things happen at sea, at least their biases will be where the money is.
------------ Forwarded Message ------------
Date: 15 April 2004 15:56 -0400
From: Tom Theroux
To: Domains
Subject: RE: Emails of PayPal customers
Hello:
We are offering 2 email databases which allow to contact PayPal and e-Gold
customers (both sellers and shoppers).
These are individuals that buy and sell items using PayPal and e-Gold
payment systems. (Please notice that 90% of PayPal customers are also
customers of eBay.)
These databases will be perfect for selling your products/services, because
we are providing you unique prospects who purchase and sell online more
than anybody else! Besides, the data provided contains personal email
addresses of only those PayPal and e-Gold members who were active
(purchased or sold something) in the last 2 months.
PayPal - 406,000 records
e-Gold - 372,000 records
The databases will be delivered to you in any format of your choice (Excel,
ASCII, CSV, etc.). By default they are provided in 4-6MB TXT files.
New updates will be released quarterly.
The total price we are asking for both databases is $365. To place the
order please fill out the form: http://www.gmthost.com/paypal.php
To contact me please email to service@gmthost.com (THIS EMAIL ONLY! DO NOT
'REPLY').
Please notice that we also maintain a variety of other b2b and b2c lists.
Best,
Tom Dullex
---------- End Forwarded Message ----------