Zango

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

~ the obituary ~

Seventy million installations and 6.9 billion pop-up advertisements. Those are the two figures the Federal Trade Commission put on the record in November 2006, and they are still the clearest measure of what this company was. Zango preferred to describe itself by its user base, which it put at twenty million and which was a claim. The FTC counted events instead.

The business started in 1999 in Bellevue, Washington, under the name ePIPO, run by two brothers, Keith Smith as chief executive and Ken Smith as chief technologist. It became 180solutions, then Zango. The product never changed shape. You wanted a free game or a screensaver, and the download included a piece of software that would sit on the machine and serve advertisements against whatever you browsed afterward. The offer was real. The disclosure was a wall of text with a button under it.

What made it scale was the affiliate layer. ZangoCash paid other people to get the installer onto machines, and the further down that chain you went, the less anyone cared how an install actually happened. By June 2005 the company was publicly re-notifying an installed base it put at twenty million, which is a sentence that only makes sense if a large share of those twenty million had no idea what was on their computer. The settlement in November 2006 took $3 million and put a twenty-year fence around how the company could distribute anything.

Here the distance is priced rather than cultural. Adware of this class did reach Turkish machines, because the download pages and codec sites that carried it were the same ones everybody used. But an install has a value, and that value is whatever an advertiser will pay to reach the person behind it. American inventory paid. A machine in Ankara on a TTNet line got the identical pop-ups and was worth close to nothing to the people serving them. You could carry the entire cost of the product and never once be its customer.

~ the case file ~

~ the notice nobody read ~

The company's defense for a decade was consent. There was a screen that said advertisements would be shown, and clicking past that screen counted as agreement. The FTC complaint is worth reading on this point, because it does not argue that the notice was missing. It argues that the notice was placed and worded so that agreeing was the path of least resistance, and that uninstalling afterward was made harder than installing had been.

That is the adware era in one design decision. No single step in the flow was technically a lie. Every step was arranged so that the fast path and the informed path pointed in different directions.

~ suing the people who called it spyware ~

From 2007 Zango went after the security industry in court, taking on PC Tools and then Kaspersky Lab for classifying its software as malicious. The argument was that a security vendor labeling a legitimate product as a threat was doing commercial damage. Both cases went against Zango, with the courts finding that a provider of filtering software is protected when it decides what to filter.

Those rulings did more lasting good than the company ever did harm, because they settled a question that reached far past one adware firm. A scanner gets to call a thing whatever it judges the thing to be. Every antivirus product since has been standing on that.

~ what the bank took ~

The end was neither regulatory nor technical. Zango owed more than $44 million and could not service it, so in April 2009 the lenders foreclosed and the company stopped trading on the 20th. Its chief executive called the sale that followed a fire sale. Blinkx, a video search company in San Francisco, took the assets for an undisclosed sum and hired most of the staff.

The browser closed the door behind it. Pop-up blocking became default behavior and installing an extension became a permissioned act with a dialog you could not affiliate your way around. The business of putting a persistent advertising process on a stranger's desktop stopped being possible at that scale. What replaced it is not cleaner, only better hidden, because the same targeting moved into the page itself, where nobody has to install anything at all.

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