April 12th, 2006
DirectRevenue's dirty money
I wrote about DirectRevenue’s dirty laundry and summarized some of the findings from the court documents from the NY State Attorney General’s lawsuit against DirectRevenue. All of the documents are posted at Ben Edelman’s site here with his comments. DirectRevenue’s finances are most interesting — they were making tons of money, and were paying out large sums to their distributors, while users’ computers were being trashed with their adware/spyware.
Exhibit 2 has several charts showing DirectRevenue’s gross revenue over nearly 3 years. Chart 2A in Exhibit 2, page 11, displays a chart of DirectRevenue’s gross revenue attributable to a DirectRevenue program and revenue from other sources.
Chart 2B shows income by distributor or application.
Exhibit 47 shows incredible financial numbers: $38.2 of 2004 income, but only $13 of expenses, yielding $25 million of profit, or 65%.
Exhibit 23 reports specific amounts paid to particular Direct Revenue distributors from May 2004 to April 2005. Top-paid distriubtors include CDT ($1.9 million), Integrated Search ($1.7 million), Mindset ($1.2 million), ICMD ($600,000), Traffix ($479,000), Advertising.com ($361,000), West Frontier ($356,000), Adtegrity ($314,000), Flying Crocodile ($298,000), Standard Internet ($293,000), MaxW ($229,000), SurfAssistant WSW ($214,000), iDownload ($181,000), Motor Media ($126,000), and Argonaut Media ($102,000).
If you’ve ever wondered why companies do aware and spyware, and infect people’s computers, the answer is easy. It’s all about the money.
