Direct Revenue Carrying Coals to Newcastle

By Jimmy Daniels
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

Ah, where to begin. In case you aren’t aware of it, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has filed suit against Direct Revenue, makers of the reviled Aurora adware program, Offeroptimizer and other crapware. So much info is coming out, it is hard to sum it all up, other than to say, these guys suck. They make fun of their users in emails asking how to remove their “software”, they talk of ways of avoiding SP2 and anti-virus programs, their own CTO says “Aurora is pretty spooky software…” These guys aren’t just dirty, they roll around in the filth, and they got paid handsomely for it.

Discloses revenues ($6.9 million in 2003, $39 million in 2004, $33 million in January-October 2005). (4) Discloses revenues from installing other vendors’ software ($4 million for January-October 2005). (4)

Discusses the role and effects of Insight Venture Partners’ 2004 purchase of 25% of Direct Revenue for $12 million, and Direct Revenue’s borrowing from Insight and Technology Investment Capital Corp (TICC), $21.7 million total in 2004. (4-5) Shows specific 2004-2005 distributions to Direct Revenue’s senior staff, totaling more than $27 million. (6) Source: Revenews

These are the same guys who were distributing their crap through Bittorrent, and as the Paperghost put it,

In an interview just given with Eweek.com, a tale of two cities is presented - one where thousands of people have ended up with Aurora on their systems and wished they could get a can of industrial strength bug-spray to clean the damn thing out.

The other is a place where Aurora is a “valuable marketing proposition” and everybody can’t wait to have anything up to five advertising windows popped open at the same time. Source: Vitalsecurity

There are too many articles to link to, the main site to check for information on the case right now is Ben Edelman’s site where he has posted the case documents, including ones that are not publicly posted anywhere, 135 articles at last count, with many more to come.

Dowhan admits that “we promised them [a distributor] an uninstaller, and then when we thought they weren’t watching any more, removed it on purpose.” Dowhan describes this as “a successfully managed process,” although the distributor (Integrated Search) complains that “I really find insulting that I need to monitor your install process and tell you to get that fixed every time I do some tests.” Another Direct Revenue staff person adds “we are MUCH less profitable with an add/remove function in place.” Integrated Search also complains of Direct Revenue’s random filenames, random Run registry name, automatic reinstallation, and promotion of adware removers, concluding that these behaviors don’t “fit within my values” or “future regulations.”

We Say: They say they have reformed in this article on their site saying, “This lawsuit is a baseless attempt by the Office of the Attorney General to rewrite the rules of the adware business. It focuses exclusively on the company’s past practices - practices we and other industry leaders changed long ago - and says not a word about what we’re doing today,” said a company spokesperson. “We are proud of our products and the value they bring to both advertisers and consumers, the former by delivering positive, measurable results for their ad dollars, and the latter by offering free content and applications in exchange for viewing a few targeted advertisements per day.” What a joke they are, that’s like saying Saddam Hussein should be let go because he had all those people killed in the past, and has not killed anyone in months. Of course it focuses on past practices, everyone should be held accountable for their actions. Morons. Oh, and the title for this comes from this PDF on Ben’s site, where they discuss checking to see if someone’s desktop is already active, so they don’t install the software again.