The Business Protector

For years, AVG Anti-Virus has been the choice of many home computer users because of one simple factor: it’s free for personal use. Based on that, their user base has grown to about 70 million users, mostly due to word of mouth advertising and marketing. It’s been a brilliant marketing strategy and they’ve gotten TONS of free publicity and advertising because of this policy. Even better, others have imitated it, giving everybody more choice in how to best economically protect their computer.

I predict, however, that the situation is about to change. I honestly believe that AVG has done something that is going to result in a lot of their subscriber base drying up and going away — along with the free publicity that’s helped them so much in the past.

According to an article on The Register, AVG acquired Exploit Prevention Labs and its LinkScanner about six months ago. They have incoporated this technology into the new version of AVG. As a result, when somebody using AVG 8 visits a search engine (Google, Yahoo, and Live Search for now), the software actually connects to the pages listed in the search engine results and scans them for malware, even if the pages are never visited by a human.

In other words, if you own a web server that gets listed in search engine results pages (SERP), AVG is abusing YOUR bandwidth and YOUR server’s processing power to do THEIR work. A bit parasitic, if you ask me. While their desire to protect their customers’ computers is correct, doing so at the expense of web site owner — the ones who alerted people to this free product in the first place — is, in my opinion, about as smart as putting a screen door on a submarine.

While I’m all for malware protection, doing so in this manner is not the way to go. If they are really interested in doing it right, they should set up a system that will scan a website once and store the results in a central server for use on demand by all customers, then update the database as the web site changes. Of course, that would cost money, and since it’s a free product, getting the money to pay for it would be problematic. Instead, they’ve simply shifted those costs onto millions of unsuspecting web site owners without permission and without authorization.

Is this good business, AVG? Nope; you’ve shot yourselves in the foot, if you ask me. Why should the cost of mitigating YOUR risk fall on MY business?

So how big will this AVG problem be? With over 70 million users of AVG (and about 50 million have not yet upgrade)d, it could very well cause tremendous problems. The Register article tells about their experience, as well as the experience of others, and it’s easy to see where web analytics will go out the window while bandwidth and server costs skyrocket.

And here’s something else to think about: If you have set Google to display 100 results per page, do you want to wait for AVG to scan 100 websites? For that matter, if you are on a dialup (or even broadband), do you want to wait for 10 pages to scan? It’s going to slow stuff down a lot for everybody, including users.

So for now, I’m recommending that people NOT upgrade to AVG 8, especially those of us with web servers. Of course, everybody has to decide for themselves.

I’ll take it a step further. I’m asking people everywhere to consider pulling their recommendation for AVG free anti-virus software from their websites because that free recommendation will most likely end up costing THEM in the end. Imagine the irony, if you will: you try to be helpful on your website by pointing out to people about this free anti-virus program, and in return, that free recommendation increases your web hosting costs while stripping away your ability to do any sort of traffic analytics. Why would you want to recommend a program that does that to you — especially when there are alternatives that work just as well, if not better?

And if you’re looking for a good free replacement for AVG, Avast offers free anti-virus software for personal use (among others). As always, please read the license agreement first to ensure that you are eligible for the free version.

–Tom

P.S. — Please bear in mind that this blog post, as always, is simply my own personal opinion and is based on what little I know about the situation. It has nothing to do with the effectiveness of the software (I haven’t seen any test results); rather, it is my way of criticizing their way of doing business. Do your own research and come to your own conclusions before deciding on your own course of action.