Claria today announced that they will be selling their AdWare division. Most of us are surprised that they have any other divisions. Claria, formally Gator, made a large splash in the early days of AdWare. Their Gator Wallet idea, which would hold all your personal financial info, was really nothing buy an excuse to download a component into your Internet Explorer browser and pop-up ads to you as you shopped around.

Other companies such as Exact Advertising, WhenU, and 180Solutions have all felt the sting of being labeled more annoying than Spam by consumers, and law makers.

AdWare was great product in it’s time for marketers. I remember the first time I saw a United Airlines plane flying across the Delta Airlines website. The idea of popping over competitors was about as guerilla as you could get. But even then I knew, this won’t last.

AdWare held on longer than I expected. Some of the players even tried to buy their way into respectability buy acquiring other companies. This has had little success for them.

With law suits being handed out by many states, and anti-virus companies like McAfee and Zonelabs fighting these applications, there was no way these companies could survive. Even Microsoft took their shot at these companies with SP2.

If you are concerned about AdWare, the best way to defend yourself is to buy a Mac. The second best way is to use Firefox.

gator, claria, adware, spyware

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 at 10:47 amand is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.