Fergie's Tech Blog

Ben Edelman: Claria Shows Ads Through Exploit-Delivered Popups

Ben Edelman writes in his blog:

Seeking to clean up its image, Claria has tried to distance itself from competing "adware" vendors -- hiring a privacy officer, filing comments with the FTC, even setting up an anti-spyware site. It's no surprise that Claria wants little to do with other vendors in this space: Other vendors' entirely nonconsensual installations (1, 2, 3) are a magnet for criticism. These vendors even undercut Claria's pricing -- showing ads for as little as $0.015 per display, where Claria demands a minimum payment of $25,000 per ad campaign.

But despite Claria's dislike of "spyware" vendors who install advertising software without any notion of user consent, Claria funds and supports such vendors in at least two distinct ways. First, Claria pays spyware vendors to show Claria's own ads through their popups -- thereby recruiting more users to install Claria's advertising software. Second, Claria buys traffic from spyware vendors and uses this traffic to show ads for Claria's advertiser clients -- including merchants as reputable as Amazon.

So even as Claria reforms its own practices -- improving its installation methods and scaling back its controversial popups -- Claria is buying ads from others whose practices are far inferior.

posted by Fergie @ 10/18/2005 06:21:00 AM