When I download some installers and run them I notice it offerring me to install other things like Opera. I don’t understand why they feel the need to do this. Why? Are they endorsed by the people who made them?
In: Technology
Money. The answer is money.
The history of this practice comes from the real world. I don’t have a source for this, but I did work at a direct marketing firm, so I have background in the industry.
Before the internet, banks had to mail 100% of their customers statements each month. This cost them money to print all those statements, plus the postage required to mail them. Someone at the bank figured: Hey, since we have to mail this stuff anyway, what if we offered to include marketing materials from third-party sources in our statements? We could cover the cost of the statement mailing, and possibly even turn it into a revenue center.
And thus the statement mailer was born.
Since then, every business process that involves a finite point of contact with a customer comes under pressure to include “statement mailer” materials. In the virtual world, this comes in the form of bundles installers.
Got yourself a new printer? Well, you’re going to need to install the driver. That’s a finite point of contact with the customer. They *have* to install the driver, so let’s charge someone else for the opportunity to wedge their software in there. We’ll charge them one price for opt-in installation of their package, but we’ll charge them *much more* for opt-out installation of their package.
All of this is just legitimate business partnerships that put money ahead of customer experience. Not terrible; not great.
However, as this type of marketing became normalized, a secondary market emerged. When users need a piece of software, they often go right to a search engine, rather than directly to the source.
Need a driver for an “HP M283fdw” printer? Why go to hp.com when you can go to Google!?
Need a free image editor? Why go directly to the GIMP website when you can go to Google!?
<facepalm>
This end-user behavior opened the door for a secondary market for driver and software downloads. Websites emerged with the singular objective of being the top search engine result for popular software downloads, displacing the official sources. These websites would take official software installers and repackage them with paid “statement mailer” installers that bundled third-party software. Then they get paid for the installs.
It’s important to note that virtually no software publisher officially supports this practice of repackaging. Any website engaging in this behavior is breaking a rule. The only exception would be open source software that is published under very permissive licenses, but those are in the minority. Even in those cases, you can bet the original author would prefer someone else *not* repackage their software. Their license just doesn’t prevent it.
Let’s look at Opera.
Opera offers affiliate marketing programs that pay for installs. There are tens of thousands of participants in this program; probably >100,000 participants. Opera has terms & conditions that restrict the methods used to promote installation, but there are so many participants that they can’t watch everyone closely.
So what happens is that unscrupulous website advertisers get a legitimate affiliate marketing ID, operate legitimately for a bit, then start plugging their affiliate ID into unscrupulous bundled installers. The money machine keeps printing money, so they keep doing this until someone stops them… Then they start over again and just keep going.
And that, my friends, is why we can’t have nice things.
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