“Adware’s Second Act”

Stefanie Olsen at News.com recaps some of the efforts that adware makers have undertaken to become more legitimate. She points to the example of WhenU, which changed its installation policies and cleaned out some distributors–and watched its installation base drop up to 50%.

This is good news, isn’t it? Adware vendors have heard the critics (and others) and are cleaning up their practices accordingly. There was a bubble of bad practices for a couple of years, and we’ve moved beyond that.

As a result, I hope we will get a truer picture of social demand for adware. I think it’s far greater than most people give it credit for. Specifically, I think in 10 years from now, virtually every online ad-delivery mechanism/network will look a lot like adware. And I further think we’ll be appalled at how crude the ad-delivery mechanisms of the late 1990s and early 2000s really were.