Gator / Claria

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

~ the goodbye ~

gator showed up on every windows machine that ran kazaa for too long. by mid-2003 the company's own filings claimed 35 million pcs had its software installed, which made it the largest single piece of unwanted commercial code on the consumer internet. for most of those installs nobody had explicitly chosen gator. it came along inside a "free download" eula that scrolled past in a sub-window during a kazaa install.

the original 1998 product was actually defensible. denis coleman, who had co-founded symantec, joined sasha zorovic and engineer mark pennell on a piece of windows software that filled in form fields for you. password autofill in 1998 was a real consumer need. then jeff mcfadden was hired as ceo in march 1999, zorovic got pushed out, and the company pivoted into the only business model that could turn a free utility into a revenue line. it served pop-up ads on top of the websites you were already visiting, using the data the autofill product was already collecting about you.

by 2002 it was serving ads on top of the new york times and dow jones properties. those publishers sued in june 2002 for ad replacement. one of the central legal arguments was whether gator's pop-up over a competing site counted as a derivative work of the underlying page. the case settled in 2003 without a clean ruling, but the lawsuit gave the antispyware community a name to point at.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

the bundle relationship with kazaa is the part most people remember. you would go to download a music file in 2002 or 2003 and install kazaa to do it. gator arrived along with the install. once it was on the machine it served local pop-up ads that looked like they were part of the page you were visiting. close one, three more opened. uninstall the obvious one and three child processes kept running. on a 33.6k or 56k dial-up connection like the one i had on ttnet in those years, each ad slowed page loads to a crawl.

gator's defense was always that the user had technically clicked yes to the eula. that defense did some heavy lifting in legal filings and almost none of it with the public.

~ the rename ~

on october 30 2003 the company changed its name to claria corporation. in the press release ceo jeff mcfadden said the new name would "better communicate the expanding breadth of offerings." in practice it was a brand-laundering exercise. the underlying software did not change and the installer relationships did not change. the antispyware tools picked up on the new name within weeks anyway.

microsoft considered buying claria in 2005 for around $500 million. internal pushback was severe enough that the deal collapsed. shortly after, microsoft antispyware (later windows defender) stopped flagging claria's software, which the security press treated as a courtesy ahead of the failed deal. that one decision did more to discredit early windows defender than any technical issue.

~ how it actually ended ~

in march 2006 claria announced it was exiting the adware business and pivoting to a "personalized search" product called personalweb. on july 1 2006 it stopped serving pop-up ads. the personalweb pivot never produced a product anyone used. the company laid off its remaining staff in october 2006 and sold the gator.com domain on april 21 2008. malwiki and a handful of forensics writeups are the only places where the corporate timeline still exists in one place.

by 2008 the adware era was over for two reasons. windows xp service pack 2 had landed in 2004 with the pop-up blocker turned on by default in internet explorer. and the click-through economics had shifted to web ads served inside search and inside the rising social platforms, which did not need a desktop install to function. gator had been a workaround for a missing ad-targeting layer in the browser. once google and facebook built that layer natively, the workaround had no reason to exist.

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