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What if Yahoo created a piece of software to
uninstall Gator--any problem with that?
That would be up to the consumer. The
consumer is the one who ought to decide what the
consumer wants to have running on their desktop. I
don't have a say in that, nor does any other Web site.
Many consumers say they haven't given their
consent for the service because it's bundled with
third-party programs.
It's hard for me to imagine the consumer
wouldn't understand what's going on, even if they
didn't read the screen when they gave us permission
and the disclosures, etc...When somebody gets our
software...for starters, Gator is going to pop up
periodically to help them fill out forms and log in.
The next thing that they're likely to see is that
Gator is going to pop up over a Web page with a
competing offer.
How does your company make money?
We sell advertising. That's the root of
the contention with the IAB...Robin Webster, the CEO of the IAB, was quoted as saying that "Gator is a
software company, not a media company, and they have no business selling advertising and we think it's
unethical and illegal." Well, gosh, we're in the
business of offering consumers free software
applications that lots of people enjoy using...and it's
archaic that the only company that can be in the
advertising business are those that are IAB members.
But isn't your ad-delivery model undermining
the financial health of the Web sites you're
delivering ads to? And ultimately, couldn't that put
your business in jeopardy?
I can understand why Web site publishers don't like this advertising in its current form. It's only natural that they'd like to control what a Web visitor sees on their computer screen. But unlike TV, the consumer can run lots of programs on his PC at the same time, and unless the government starts passing some kind of laws against that there will be lots of things happening on the screen simultaneously.
Specifically to your point, the thing that's so new that we can do to revitalize the online advertising industry...is to use these anonymous profiles to understand and power other forms of advertising. One way that this might play out is that we could help major online publishers understand which of their users are interested in a minivan right now and help that publication show that consumer advertising about a minivan. Instead of popping up over some other advertisement, why don't we work together and just show the relevant advertisement to the consumer, right from the get-go?
How many downloads come from deals with other software suppliers such as Audiogalaxy and how many come from people venturing to your
site directly?
Close to half download our software from our
Web site and the other half are from bundling
arrangements. Audiogalaxy is one of them, and we don't publish a list of the others. The advertising we're selling, we use that to pay our distributors. The arrangements are all different and all confidential.
Have some advertisers retreated from using
your service now that some publishers have criticized
it?
We're concerned that that could happen, and
that's why we took swift action. So far the response
from advertisers has been very solid.
Many CNET News.com readers have said they were initially pleased with Gator software because it's helpful managing passwords and IDs. But
many now criticize the software for getting carried
away with pop-up ads and taking away from the value of the service. Is this true? Have you upped sales of pop-ups?
There's a delicate balance between trying to figure
out the amount of ads that balances the value that
we are delivering with the software product. We're
learning about that. I'm sure that there are some
people that saw too many pop-ups from Gator and may have decided not to use the software. But the average number of pop-ups that users saw last month was between four and four and a half. The frequency is much lower than people imagine.
Isn't there a danger of alienating your users
with too much advertising?
The consumer is king here. And if they don't
like Gator because we didn't fill out a form
incorrectly or because they believe they're seeing too
much advertising...they would pull the plug on that...But we don't need government agencies or the IAB to make decisions for the consumers on that point.
Many critics call Gator "spyware"--software that
tracks consumers across the Web and keeps a file on
them--and are suspicious about what Gator does behind the curtain. Is it linked with personally
identifiable information? And how is it shared with
third parties?
We wait for certain kinds of events to take place like someone being interested in flowers, and we
take small snippets of the click stream that our
software is looking for on the consumer's PC, and it
doesn't by any stretch take the consumer's click stream
and send it back to Gator's servers en masse.
Secondly, all of this is anonymous, and we feel
strongly that we don't want to know who our users are.
But don't you have all that personally
identifiable information when users register, like
names and site passwords?
We made it clear to consumers from the
beginning that all that information is stored on their
PC and not on our servers, and that's an important
distinction between Gator and Microsoft Passport
service, for example.
Why is it so difficult to uninstall this program?
Well, it's not. You can uninstall Gator and
Offer Companion just like you uninstall any other
software on the PC by going to the add/remove programs facility that is present on any PC, and it takes about four clicks of the mouse. My 11-year-old can do this in 30 seconds. There are other software packages where people are trying to obscure the way to uninstall it, but that's certainly not the case with Gator.
Is it true that it's one install and then two
uninstalls?
That depends. If the software came along
with Audiogalaxy, there's a single install that
installs Audiogalaxy, Gator and Offer Companion.
To be clear, you have to uninstall both
Offer Companion and Gator to be rid of both?
The consumer is able to uninstall either or
both. They're independent.
What are your long-term plans for Gator?
Well, advertisers have been flocking to this
and are very happy with the results, so we're going to
be expanding our number of advertisers and users.
Coming downstream, we're going to have other Gator applications that we think consumers are going to enjoy. There are other interesting applications that I can't preannounce. 
