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The Spyware Inferno

Posted by TimSlavin at August 17, 2004

"To really explode, adware required two forces: the rise of peer-to-peer applications and the rise of cost-per-click advertising. Imagine you own a peer-to-peer file-sharing application (for example, Kazaa) that is being used for copyright infringement en masse. People will do almost anything to get it, short of paying for it directly. So you get an adware distributor (say Claria, formerly Gator) to pay per installation of your application if you will bundle its adware. Claria spent about $19.3 million in 2003 on distribution arrangements such as this, or about 43 cents per active user.

To cover the installation payment, the adware watches the user's Web surfing and advertises accordingly, usually with a pop-up ad. For example, when we visited the Dish Network home page with Claria installed, an advertisement for DirecTV popped up. This is politely called 'contextual advertising.'"

From CNET. Whatever you think of spyware, this is an excellent, mostly neutral, telling of how spyware came to exist and what market forces make it viable. It certainly does not make me feel better when uninvited software hijacks my computer.

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