• by Bill McCloskey , August 14, 2001

The Cowbird is a bird renowned for sneaking into another bird's nest and replacing that bird's eggs with its own, abandoning the eggs to be hatched and raised by the unsuspecting surrogate parents. A recent movement in the client-side software industry is having a similar effect in the advertising world. Recently some online media buyers have discovered that a downloadable software application, Gator, has been stripping out their banner ads and replacing them with Gator-delivered banner ads instead. Imagine an Internet ad blocking software that blocks ads with other ads: that's what Gator has apparently been up to.

And there lies a conundrum: who owns the browser experience?

A company called Third Voice faced this problem a few years ago. They developed a client-side software application that allowed users to leave "post-it notes" on any website. People who had also downloaded the software could read other people's notes when they visited the site and there was little site publishers could do about it. After all, if someone wants to change their browser experience by downloading a software application, isn't that their right? Isn't that what skins are all about?

Although lawsuits were filed by angry publishers against Third Voice, nothing ever happened, at least in a court of law. Third Voice eventually just died under it's own lack of steam. But publishers are now facing a bigger threat with the advent of newer, more powerful client-side applications.

Ostensibly, Gator acts as a personal digital wallet: it is a shopping bot, finding the lowest prices before you buy at your favorite eCommerce site. It also takes the drudgery out of filling those nasty Web forms for you by automatically plugging in your passwords, email address, mailing address, and credit card number and other info which is stored locally on your computer in an encrypted format. It also delivers coupons to you for discounts and products and services you can sign up for or purchase. But all of this comes at a cost: Gator collects quite a bit of personal information about its users, and makes no bones about it. Here's a page from their privacy policy about the stuff they collect:

1. Your email address, first name, country and ZIP code (limited to first 5 digits in the U.S.)

2. Your Gator.com ID which is a numeric identifier that is generated by Gator.com when you receive Gator ServWareApps.

3. Information about web pages you visit -- this information includes a site's web address, time spent at a site, transaction activity, where Gator ServWareApps were used, site entry and exit patterns, and some products and information viewed.

4. Any optional demographic information you choose to provide us such as gender and income.

5. History of various special offers and advertising delivered by Gator ServWareApps, and your various responses to them.

6. Standard web log information and system settings such as user IP addresses, browser type and versions, screen resolution, time zone selected and the version numbers of some of the software installed on your personal computer.

Wow!!!

Gator uses this information to deliver highly targeted advertising to its users. And it does so in a very interesting way. Because Gator is a client-side software product that can get between the user and the Web page he or she is looking at (much like Third Voice), Gator can deliver their highly targeted ads, theoretically, to any Web page without involving, or paying the website involved. They just roll their ads out on top of the ads that are currently running on the page, just like Third Voice overlaid a Post-it Note. Imagine that you just bought an ad placement on the front page of Yahoo! (and spent a pretty penny doing it). Along I come with my Gator enhanced browser and instead of seeing your ad, I might see a Gator delivered ad instead. And just as theoretically, as a media buyer I could purchase advertising on the front page of any website without ever involving or paying the site: I pay Gator to deliver the ad to their users whenever those users go to that particular site.

Of course, the interesting thing is that I might have downloaded the Gator software without even realizing it. Like a Trojan horse, Gator is bundled with many of the peer-to-peer software applications that are used for sharing music files. I downloaded one package recently, and all of a sudden I had Gator on my computer without my knowing it. I had to use regedit to actually edit my Windows registry files to get rid of it completely. (Don't try that at home, folks.)

So the question is: is this fair? Is this a legitimate way to deliver advertising? And if it is, what does that do to the Internet economy?

Who owns the browser experience?

-- Bill McCloskey is Founder and CEO of Emerging Interest, an organization dedicated to educating the Internet advertising and marketing industry about rich media and other emerging technologies. He may be reached at bill@emerginginterest.com.