Inside an Adware Company

Haikster writes "Brad Stone of Newsweek wrote a great article exposing DirectRevenue which is actually a combination of the old Dash guys with IPInsight, abetterinternet, offeroptimizer and blackstonemedia and the others... it's a bit lengthy but a great read."

Comments

How many are Slashdot readers?

[badfrog]

Wonder how many of spyware developers are regular Slashdot readers... Step forward, cowards!

Re:How many are Slashdot readers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Gonna go AC here (sorry), but since you asked, this might be an interesting story (but rather long, if you care to bear with me)...

I used to work for a company that made pretty hardcore spyware/popups. The owners claimed when they first hired me to do some consulting that they used popups to generate capital instead of going for VC money, and now that they had some income, were going to turn around and try to be a kind of Amazon/1-click shopping for useful tools (spam filters, privacy software, personal firewalls). This was a couple years ago before the market for this was absolutely saturated. So I thought, and the principals assured me, that once they had some $, they'd ditch the popup business and I'd be working on some really cool projects which I otherwise wouldn't have had the opportunity to work on, so I signed on fulltime. I was also really well paid and genuinely enjoyed the benefits, interesting engineering challenges, and people I worked with (none of the usual Office Space bullshit my friends complained about, but there were many downsides as you will see.)

However, after I joined, the owners kind of lost focus and kept delaying work on more legit projects to fix or enhance their popup distribution network or new things that all boiled down to schemes that would get our adware on more computers. Every week they owners would come up with some half baked new idea that was suddenly priority 1 (and the idea of "top priority" became something of a joke.) Because things took longer than expected and we were switching gears every week or so and could never truly get anything accomplished, the skewed lesson that the owners learned was that "software development is hard and expensive and not worth it".

At this point they stopped even fronting that they'd do legit things and just focused completely on adware. To keep the bills (and the principals' inflated salaries) paid, they started loosening their morals even more and fell down the slippery slope even more, delving into porn and other kinda shady areas which I won't go into, at which point I decided to resign since it was obvious that despite repeated promises, I would never be working on projects that had real value.

The time wasn't all wasted, though. In case anyone's curious, it is kind of interesting to see how things operate behind the scenes at one of these spyware places, and the psychology of the people who work there. I second another poster's point that the everyone who worked there -- business and developer types alike -- were otherwise normal, cool guys and not like evil masterminds or sociopaths or anything. (Ha, all of us were /. readers, too.) Everyone knows that what they're doing isn't totally cool but is sort of in denial (and we were repeatedly promised that we'd be working on legit projects "soon"), and you're so caught up in your work and the interesting engineering problems that you ignore the bigger picture (not a good thing).

The owners do a good job of sheltering themselves and most employees from the negative complaints that do arrive (delegating them to a "support" department that responds to hundreds of emails a day with "oh wow, we're sorry you're having problems, here's an uninstaller"). However, most of us did end up reading a lot of the complaints and most of us were in denial about the sheer volume of misery that the popups and other things created. It sounds strange that normal people would work on such clearly awful software, but every shady decision is rationalized in any number of ways including saying "well, it's legal" (or at least not illegal, for now), pointing to "worse" adware companies and being "at least we're not as bad as these assholes," policies like "hey, we email uninstallers to anyone who asks" (while ignoring the fact that only 1% might be savvy enough to actually figure out what's going on since most people never figure out where the popups come from). This will sound strange, but some of the projects were actually really cool technology and worth getting