Adware Business ... What ? & How ?

Couple of days back, I was listening to security now podcast presented by Steve Gibson. Steve is the owner of grc.com web site, and the SpinRite software - the industry's #1 hard drive data recovery. As usual, he was talking about many security topics, but one topic amazed me and I was so interested to dig down and explore more about. The topic was adware business.

Adware business is a way to customize the ads that is shown to the customer who is visiting a web page. Based on some information about the customer or the web page it self, the company that is running the adware business customizes the web page ads to be more relevant. The ISP enables the company to access these information, and off course he is getting paid. Today I will talk about some examples of the adware companies and how they are running their business.


Adzilla is a Vancouver, Canadian-based company running an Adware business. The company is buying the Zip code for the end user from the ISP, and stores it in a hardware called Zillacaster which is basically a proxy server with some extra feature. Adzilla then sell the Zip code to the advertisers and web publisher in order for them to customize the web page ads to be as relevant as possible. By doing this, the customer will get more relevant ads without disclosing the customer identity. Off course the Zip code is an indicator of the people wealth and ethnicity. Adzilla calls this technology “Caller ID for the internet”.



Google AdSense is another technology to run the adware business. Instead of getting the customer information, AdSense do some analysis for the wab page content (it called crawl) and then deliver text and image ads that are relevant to the web page content.



AdSense also allows the web publisher to put a Google web search inside his web page. Every time the page visitor uses this web search tool, the customer is getting paid.




NebuAd is an American on line advertising company. The company installs surveillance hardware called deep packet inspection in the ISP network, analyze every customer packet and monitor the customer browsing habits. In addition, the company uses an ad injection system that allows the ISP to add their own ads into the web page, regardless of the advertisement deal that is already exist between the web publisher and the advertisers.

"This data is stripped of personal and personally identifiable information and held in aggregate only -- NebuAd does not take information from ISP data systems, and does not share any data with ISP's, so no data concentration occurs" -NebuAD