I wanted to think of something clever something catchy to get folks to read what I am about to write. I thought of nothing. How spyware started came to me in a moment of thoughts of nothingness. But the information I am about to give to you, could piss a few people off.

I have been creating websites for almost ten years now. And in those ten years I have made a little money from different advertisers throughout. Some have come and gone in the past. But one company that still stands out as a leader and a trend setter, is also responsible for the start of one of the worst known threats to PCs.

Doubleclick. for many years has been labeled the beast of all beasts. If a webmaster wanted to make money with banner revenues, the place he could get the most money per impression was doubleclick.

When I was finally accepted to doubleclicks publisher network I was thrilled. I thought of how much more money I could make and how easy it would be to decide which advertisers banners I would use on my sites.

I was shocked to find out that the web interface to manage my doubleclick account was mediocre to say the least. Every single banner even the duplicates had to be manually viewed for approval. One day while approving and un approving ads, i noticed that nearly every ad that I was viewing for approval wanted me to download something. Instead of this being displayed on the banner, an alert window would pop up and ask me to install something. The more banners I went to approve, the more and more these banners wanted to install.

I emailed doubleclick and asked them why are these advertisements asking me to download? I was told that some of the banners were from software companies that used the banners to install software. I told doubleclick that I did not want to have my website visitors to have to download and install software just visit the site. In order to turn these downloads off I had to send a special request to support requesting so. I got an email back from support stating that if I disabled the banners that installed software my revenue shares would be hurt drastically. So I thought to myself maybe if I install this software, I wont be prompted to download and install it again. I was very wrong. Not only did their software not detect that it was already installed, it would duplicate itself and run multiple instances of the exe that was in the process list.

What this all boils down to is that doubleclick. what was at one time the leader in online marketing, encouraged spyware vendors to use doubleclick as a way to install their spyware. Doubleclick. audience reaches over 85% of the internet users in the world. Doubleclick. showed the world how profitable spyware in banner advertising could be.

Sometime back in the 90's doubleclick. outsourced or sold its publishers part of the business to maxonline. The odd thing about the move was that anyone who is anyone thought that something would be different about the interface and functionality of the publishers management screen. Unfortunately it was the exact same.

Even though doubleclick may seem more popular and corporate, their web based interfaces are weak. And if you compare doubleclick. publishers interface to casalemedia. fastclick. or bluelithium. you will find out that doubleclick is weak, and maxonline is weak.

Words for thought. Just recently I found out that maxonline is now owned by AskJeeves. AskJeeves also owns these spyware infesting companies: MySearch. MyWay. and FunWebProducts.

Final Note.

Doubleclick.net can take most of the blame making spyware profitable. Someone has to pay for advertising their software. That someone is a company. That company leaves a paper trail. Doubleclick and all the other publisher networks know where their money is coming from and who. The problem is that money can keep things secret.