Why Adware Is Here To Stay: It's Very Big Business

If Richard Stiennon's calculations are accurate, the adware industry could be generating revenues of up to USD 2.5 billion a year. The top seven adware producers are making between USD 65 million and USD 200 million each.

Photo credit: John Siebert

Richard Stiennon is Vice President of Threat Research for Webroot, a well-regarded US-based provider of privacy, protection and performance software. In his personal Threat Chaos Blog, Stiennon extrapolates market research data collected by Webroot through its 'SpyAudit', which is a survey it undertakes every quarter with Earthlink, the Internet Service Provider. The data is used to compile Webroot's Top Ten Threats report.

Webroot collated data on scans of 1.49 million PCs. Almost half of all machines were infected by Cool Web Search, the most prevalent adware globally. Claria's Gator (GAIN) and 180Solutions' 180search Assistant were the next two most prevalent, infecting 15% and 14% of machines respectively.

 

 

The research collated by Stiennon ranked the seven top adware programs as follows, based on the number of machines infected:

1. Cool Web Search: 718,210 machines
May hijack any of the following: Web searches, home page, and other Internet Explorer settings. Recent variants of CoolWebSearch install using malicious HTML applications or security flaws, such as exploits in the HTML Help format and Microsoft Java Virtual machines.

2. Gator (GAIN): 215,866 machines
May display banner advertisements based on user Web surfing habits. Gator is usually bundled with numerous free software programs, including the popular file-sharing program Kazaa.

3. 180search Assistant: 203,707 machines
Delivers targeted pop-up advertisements to a user's computer. Whenever a key word is entered into a search engine or a targeted Web site is visited, 180search Assistant opens a separate browser window displaying an advertiser's Web page that is related to the key word or site.

4. BlazeFind: 178,230 machines
May hijack any of the following: Web searches, home page, and other Internet Explorer settings. BlazeFind may redirect Web searches through its own search engine and change default home pages to www.blazefind.com. This hijacker may also change other Internet Explorer settings.

5. ISTbar/AUpdate: 159,137 machines
A toolbar used for searching pornographic web sites that may display pornographic pop-ups and hijack user homepages and Internet searches.

6. Transponder (v2): 158,505 machines
An Internet Explorer Browser Helper Object that monitors requested web pages and data entered into online forms, then delivers targeted advertisements.

7. Internet Optimizer: 154,901 machines
Hijacks error pages and redirects them to its own controlling server at http://www.internet-optimizer.com.

Stiennon then makes the following assumption:

"If we take the leap and assume that the sample is representative of the Internet in total we can estimate how many machines have each of these products installed on them. Using the reported number of "active Internet users" from the same time frame, 265 million, we get the following number of installs for each of these products:"

1. Cool Web Search: 127,841,380

2. Gator (GAIN): 38,424,148

3. 180search Assistant: 36,259,846

4. BlazeFind: 31,724,940

5. ISTbar/AUpdate: 28,326,386

6. Transponder (v2): 28,213,890

7. Internet Optimizer: 27,572,378

Based on the reported earnings of two adware houses, namely Claria, which revealed that their software resided on 40 million PCs and they generated USD 90 million in revenue a year, and Avenue Media, which claimed they had 2 million infected machines that generated USD 7 million annually, Stiennon has estimated that the average cash flow per 'customer installation' per year is USD 2.40.

On this basis, the annual revenues of the top seven adware houses look like this:

1. Cool Web Search: USD 306,819,312

2. Gator (GAIN): USD 92,217,955
3. 180search Assistant: USD 87,023,630
4. BlazeFind: USD 76,139,856
5. ISTbar/AUpdate: USD 67,983,326
6. Transponder (v2): USD 67,713,336
7. Internet Optimizer: USD 66,173,707

In total, these figures add up to a staggering USD 764,071,123.

And that's just for the top seven.

Stiennon's estimate of USD2.5 billion for the entire industry globally doesn't look quite so unbelievable.

There's a global gold rush going on and your PC is being staked.