Spyware companies are apparently netting HUGE profits, it doesn’t surprise me though with the amount of people that actually install the crap on their machines..

Let’s say we don’t like companies like Direct Revenue very much though.

Consumers have strong opinions about Direct Revenue’s software. “If I ever meet anyone from your company, I will kill you,” a person who identified himself as James Chang said in an e-mail to Direct Revenue last summer. “I will f—— kill you and your families.” Such sentiments aren’t unusual. “You people are EVIL personified,” Kevin Horton wrote around the same time. “I would like the four hours of my life back I have wasted trying to get your stupid uninvited software off my now crippled system.”

Direct Revenue makes spyware…and they make money too.

Although it is small by some corporate standards, having generated sales of about $100 million since its start in 2002, its programs have burrowed into nearly 100 million computers and produced billions of pop-up ads.

That’s a hell of a lot.

The industry in general is making a hell of a lot, can you believe it, 11% of total Internet money made is from spyware/adware.

Spyware rakes in an estimated $2 billion a year in revenue, or about 11percent of all Internet ad business, says the research firm IT-Harvest. Direct Revenue’s direct customers have included such giants as Delta Air Lines and Cingular Wireless. It has sold millions of dollars of advertising passed along by Yahoo. And Direct Revenue has received venture capital from the likes of Insight Venture Partners, a respected New York investment firm.

Somehow..the figures disturb me.

Source: MSNBC