You should never trust those spam e-mails that flood your inbox, but what if you did? “I got so many e-mails about these spam stocks,” says Joshua Cyr of Portsmouth. “I was thinking, you can’t track how effective the e-mails are for penis (pumps), Viagra and whatever, but you can track how effective (the stock e-mails) are.”

He filtered the stock tips out of his inbox and set up a mock portfolio using 37 stocks found in the e-mails. On May 5, Cyr then posted www.spamstocktracker.com and tracked the stocks. For an initial “investment” of $17,405, Cyr has just under $8,000 hypothetical dollars left.

During the first few months of the Web site’s life, Cyr said he “might have had a person a day visit.” It wasn’t until last week, when he e-mailed friends and family a link to the site, that it began to attract attention. On Oct. 3, a short article about the site ran in the Portsmouth Herald, though the Web site’s address wasn’t listed. That morning at 11:45, Brian McWilliams, author of “Spam Kings” and a Seacoast resident, posted a link to Cyr’s stock project on his blog, spamkings.oreilly.com. O’Reilly Media, publisher of “Spam Kings,” posted the link on the company’s “Radar” blog later that day. BoingBoing.net, a massive blog that attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors each day, had a link to Cyr’s site up on Tuesday at 11:20 p.m. All it took was 36 hours and a couple of blog posts for visits to Cyr’s site to explode. About 100 people had checked out the Web site on Tuesday, Cyr said. By Wednesday, that number had swelled to more than 25,000.  The New York Post, the Financial Times, the Arizona Republic and thestreet.com all picked up the story.

Cyr, , chief technical officer of Savvy Software, a sister company of Harbor Light Strategic Marketing, called the site a “one-hit wonder.”

“I don’t have anything else to offer people now except for that Web site,” he joked. “The question is whether I get one minute of fame or five minutes of fame from it.”

And though Cyr “lost” a few grand with his stock experiment, he did manage to rake in a few bucks from Google’s AdSense program. Web site publishers can use AdSense to put ads on their sites, and every time a visitor clicks on one of those ads, the site publisher makes a few cents profit. Advertisements in the AdSense program match the content featured on the Web site—for instance, the ads on Cyr’s site lead directly to, well, more penny-stock tips. From the time he created the site until Tuesday, Oct. 4, Cyr said he had made about $5 from the Google ads on the site; on Wednesday, he had made over $100.

He put a disclaimer above the ads, so that people wouldn’t think he’s a “terrible jerk shill that is hawking the same stuff he’s bashing.” 

“But,” he said, “There’s a difference in investing in penny stocks and also blindly following spam that comes in your email inbox.”