Posted by Scott Laird
Thu, 22 Sep 2005 13:27:39 GMT
I’m not an Opera user, but I’ve always found the notion of a small company trying to make money selling web browsers in a world filled with free Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari fascinating, even if it’s only a train-wreck sort of fascination. That model didn’t work very well for Netscape, and I didn’t really expect it to work for Opera, but they’ve kept hanging in there, putting out new releases year after year. Still, I figured they’d run out of money sooner or later and then the number of browsers in the world would shrink by one.
Earlier this week, I was surprised when they announced that they were going to start giving away their web browser, rather then charging $40 per copy. I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention, but assumed that either the end was probably near and they were making some last-ditch attempt to gain users.
It looks like I was wrong; I completely missed their primary revenue stream. According to Om, Opera makes most of their money from search engines. They gets a kickback whenever you search for something using their browser and click on an advertising link; since AdSense users can get a cut of search revenue, I don’t know why it never occurred to me that browser companies could make money the same way.
The Mozilla Foundation apparently brings in $30 million per year this way; that’s not bad for a free product. Apparently they found the fabled “step 2”.
Tags advertising, mozilla, netscape, opera, webbrowsers | 1 comment
Posted by Scott Laird
Mon, 09 May 2005 20:07:49 GMT
A co-worker alerted me to a possible spyware problem on his Mac this morning–anytime he went to finance.yahoo.com, all of the ‘e’s in the body text of the page were replaced with ‘3’s linked to one of mediaplex.com’s ad servers. He was concerned that some nasty bit of spyware was infesting his Mac; today’s big Firefox security issues made him a bit nervous.
I couldn’t easily reproduce this on my Mac, so we went through his Firefox configs and couldn’t find anything out of the ordinary. Then we took a look at the source code for the page and saw this (sorry about the long lines; they’re that way in the original):
<style xmlns="" type="text/css">
@import url("http://us.js1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/lib/hdr/ygma.css");
</style></head><body><!-- <script>function yfi_scraper(){var url='http://us.ard.yahoo.com/SIG=1247e20ui/M=342581.6409333.7385346.1829737/D=fin/S=7037371:FAD/EXP=1115674357/A=2709560/R=0/SIG=12auoe33c/*http://adfarm.mediaplex.com/ad/ck/1433-28823-1039-3?mpt=1115667157014528',tg=document.getElementsByTagName('b');for(var i=0;i<tg.length;i++){var el=tg[i];if(el.className=='e0'||el.className=='e1'||el.className=='e2'||el.className=='e3'){var st=el.innerHTML;var ct=new Array();for(var j=0;j<st.length;j++){var ch=st.substring(j,j+1);if(ch.toLowerCase()=='e'){ch='<a href="'+url+'">3</a>';}ct[ct.length]=ch;el.innerHTML=ct.join('');}}}}if(document.all&&document.getElementById)setTimeout(yfi_scraper,4500);</script>--><script xmlns="" type="text/javascript">
The long Javascript line is what causes the problem–it replaces all of the ‘e’s with ‘3’s linked to an advertising site, but not until a timeout has expired. So, either Yahoo put this there on purpose, or someone attached to one of their ad providers has the ability to stick random Javascript into their pages.
At this point, we finally decided to click on one of the ‘3’ links and found an ad for the new BMW 3-series cars. Suddenly the whole thing makes sense–it’s a weird advertising campaign for BMW.
I’m kind of amazed by this–Yahoo is willing to let advertisers deface Yahoo’s websites? I find this really repugnant.
Update: A lot of people have already noticed this, including The Motley Fool, Adjab.com, and Two Four One. I suspect that Technorati will have a lot of other comments shortly.
Posted in Web stuff | Tags advertising, bmw, yahoo | 2 comments
