• by Tig Tillinghast , January 9, 2002

The Internet audience has voted, and they prefer Gator to the run-of-the-mill advertisers. For those of you not paying attention a few months ago, Gator is the company that produced a cool wallet-type application that sticks itself onto your browser. It fills in forms, remembers passwords and just happens to pre-empt the currently running ads on a website with some of its own.

Apoplectic advertisers made all sorts of accusations about this last little trick a few months ago, ranging from unfair trade practice to violation of the Constitution. The problem (for them) is that Gator doesn’t really go into a site’s server and switch ads around. It only gets invited onto the users’ computers to switch out ads on their particular screens. This makes the ad pre-emption a private affair based on the preferences of the individual user – a quaint work-around that so far hasn’t succumbed to the myriad of legal threats thrown about by the ad selling community.

That quaint idea, though, has metastasized into something larger since then. In mid-December, Gator announced that it had surpassed 10 million unique users. Now, even accounting for misleading figures (the company’s product offered help about 80 million times a month over the last quarter, suggesting something fewer than 10 million live users) that’s a huge constituency.

There are several million people out there who decided that the normal advertisers out there, most of whom use advertising like a spray hose, aren’t as useful or interesting as those who will sign on to Gator, which uses advertising more like a valuable solution dispensed from an eye dropper. The targeting allowed by the Gator application makes for more relevant messages. We can see this by the click-through achieved with ads sold through Gator. Instead of half of a percent, like one would expect from a successful Internet banner campaign, Gator ads provide somewhere in the territory of 6 to 26 percent click through.

To be fair, it’s hard to tell why individuals choose to load up the Gator app. I’ve assumed that for many it’s because the ads are better and more targeted. Many more will sign up because of the wallet functions and the form filling. Still others will get the app merely because of some promotional offer they desire. But, in the end, all of these people voluntarily opted out of the normal industry chain of advertising.

They’ve become a universe unto themselves. Heck, I remember when the whole Internet (note: not just the Web) exceeded 10 million users. I was there. It was a big, hairy deal. The next morning, I strode into a media director’s office, laid out the story from Newsbytes on his desk and asked him, facetiously, if his precious syndicated media could offer up that type of exposure. Unfortunately for me back then, it could, and at a $3 CPM. But that’s another story. Anyway, 10 million users is a big, hairy deal.

I believe this has an over-riding influence in the ongoing debate about whether or not Gator is a force for good or evil. Maybe consumers aren’t quite as directly involved in the debate as the advertisers, but they are casting their votes, and a major faction apparently believes that Gator is at least the lesser of the advertising evils.