That's when McFadden and Eagle decided the company's main product was not password-storing freeware but a covert ad-delivery platform.
In 1999, Gator parlayed its early success into $12.5 million in financing. A host of similar companies followed, including WhenU, 180Solutions, and DirectRevenue. Millions of people downloaded eWallet, and Gator's bank balance began to grow. Claria wears in a sharp suit and has a scrubbed face and coiffed hair - but it still looks a lot like Gator. For the most part, though, the company is in the same business as before, courting the same customers and selling a product that does the same thing in the same ways. Journalists, watchdogs, and regulators seem mollified. It's true that the company has toned down its most aggressive tactics.
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Best of all, government agencies and watchdog groups have given their blessing to the company's latest product: software that watches everything users do online and transmits their surfing histories to Claria, which uses the data to determine which ads to show them.Īpart from plush new offices at the northern edge of Silicon Valley, it's remarkable how little the latter-day Claria differs from the old Gator. Google acknowledges Claria's technology in recent patent applications. The lawsuits have been settled - with negligible impact on the company's business - and Claria serves ads for names like JPMorgan Chase, Sony, and Yahoo! The Wall Street Journal praises the company for "making strides in revamping itself." Earlier this year, The New York Times reported that Microsoft came close to acquiring Claria. Today Gator, now called Claria, is a rising star. In a June 2002 legal brief filed with the lawsuit, attorneys for The Washington Post referred to Gator as a "parasite." ZDNet called it a "scourge." Online publishers sued the company for obscuring their Web sites with pop-ups. Mounting complaints attracted the attention of the Federal Trade Commission. Removing eWallet didn't stop the torrent of pop-ups.
People who downloaded Gator eWallet soon found their screens inundated with pop-up ads ostensibly of interest to them because of Web sites they had visited.
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Maker of a free app called eWallet, the firm was under fire for distributing what critics called spyware, code that covertly monitors a user's Web-surfing habits and uploads the data to a remote server. Back in 2002, Gator was one of the most reviled companies on the Net.
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