Direct Revenue

» see directrevenue.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The thing that separates Direct Revenue from the rest of this category is the letterhead. This was not a shell company registered somewhere warm. It was a Manhattan business with Insight Venture Partners on the cap table, four named principals, and an ad sales operation that booked Priceline and American Express. Ford bought placements. Somebody at each of those companies signed off on it.

The product went by several names over five years. A Better Internet arrived in mid-2003, Aurora in April 2005, The Best Offers that September, and they all did the same job: sit on a Windows machine, watch which sites you visited and what you searched for, and open popup ads matched against that. You did not buy it and you were rarely told you were getting it. It came attached to a free screensaver or a game or a utility, and it came bundled with Kazaa, which is how a great many of those installs happened.

I was in exactly the population this landed on. Windows XP on a home connection through TTNet, and a download habit that involved a lot of free software of uncertain provenance. Anybody who ran that stack in Turkey in 2004 was carrying some version of this, and mostly you dealt with it by reinstalling Windows twice a year rather than by reading a license agreement. What I did not have was any way to know that the popups were an American company's quarterly revenue.

~ the case file ~

~ how it got on ~

The FTC complaint, filed February 2007, is the clearest account of the engineering. Direct Revenue and its affiliate network offered free content without adequately disclosing that taking it meant installing the adware, and some affiliates skipped the offer entirely and used browser security holes to push it onto machines outright. Once installed, the popups carried no label identifying their source. The files went into rarely visited corners of the disk under names built to look like parts of Windows, and often did not appear in Add/Remove Programs at all.

Then the part that gives the whole thing away: the software installed a second component whose job was to put the adware back if you removed it, or if your antispyware caught it first. When the company did publish an uninstall tool, on separate websites, using it meant a ten-step procedure that required downloading more software and switching off every third-party firewall on the machine. Commissioner Jon Leibowitz noted in his dissent that at one point the adware shipped bundled with a popup blocker.

~ the ten steps ~

Leibowitz dissented because $1.5 million was the entire monetary penalty, against owners who by BusinessWeek's reckoning had taken more than $20 million out of the business. His statement asks the questions the number does not cover. How many people lost work because the machine crashed. How many junked a perfectly good computer that had become useless. He quotes one of them, Kevin Horton, writing to the company: "You people are EVIL personified... I would like the four hours of my life back I have wasted trying to get your stupid uninvited software off my now crippled system."

The best detail in the record is domestic. The software crashed one of Direct Revenue's own employees' computers four times in a single day, and the company had to send somebody out to fix a machine belonging to one of its own venture capital investors. They could not keep it off the people funding it.

~ the reckoning ~

Eliot Spitzer's office sued in New York County Supreme Court on 4 April 2006 under the state's general business law. That case went nowhere: in March 2008, months after the company no longer existed, a judge dismissed all of it, holding that the click-wrapped license had been adequately disclosed in the transactions the state's own investigators completed, and that Direct Revenue could not be held liable for distributors it had contractually required to obtain consent. The attorney general had asked for billions on behalf of everyone who had ever been installed on. He got nothing from the company itself.

The money that did move went sideways. Spitzer's office settled separately with the advertisers, taking payments from Priceline and Travelocity among others and requiring them to check where their online ads were actually being delivered. Leibowitz singled that out as the more useful piece of enforcement, because the ad budgets were what made an installed base worth expanding in the first place.

~ the gmail address ~

There was no press release. Some time before 19 October 2007, bestoffersnetworks.com stopped being a product site and became a single page reading "Best Offers and Direct Revenue have ceased operations." Underneath sat nine numbered steps for finding the entry in Add/Remove Programs, a downloadable uninstaller that promised to delete itself when it finished, and a note that if you had it through Kazaa you should use the Kazaa entry instead. Computerworld reported the closure on 24 October and got no reason out of anyone.

For email support, the page gave an address at gmail.com. A company that had billed Ford Motor Company, raised institutional venture money and put software on 150 million computers wound down to a free webmail account somebody was checking out of obligation. That page was still up in April 2008, minus the uninstaller. directrevenue.com now redirects to an https address that answers nothing at all.

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