Chances are if you spend a lot of time on the Internet, you have had encounters with adware. Whether or not these encounters with adware were a positive or negative one is up to the user to decide. That being said, this article's purpose isto simply help distinguish the positive and negative characteristics of adware.

Looking At Adware From a Negative Aspect:

For the majority of people, adware's negative characteristics are nothing but obvious. Probably the biggest problem people have with adware is its ability to cause advertisements to spontaneously pop up on your computer. On top of that, adware also has a reputation of decreasing the speed and performance of computer's.

Putting adware's functionality aside, people have also developed forms of aggravation when trying to eliminate adware from their systems. From virus scans, to restarting the computer, to trying various manual solutions provided by others on the Internet, some adware will just not seem to go away, no matter what people do. In these situations, it seems the only proven solution to removing adware is to reformat the computer and then just reinstall everything, which is usually considered a bad alternative.

With these points being said, a lot of people can probably agree that adware does have its negative characteristics. It would be no surprise to hear additional complaints from people aside from the points listed earlier, but these are just the primary frustrations people have. So, if adware causes all of these problems to people and their computers, you may be wondering how on earth it can have any positive traits whatsoever. Read on, and you'll see that this is not a myth.

The Positive Affects of Adware:

Here is a question for you: have you ever got something off of the Internet for free (legally, of course) and the owner of that download asked you for a donation? With that in mind, did you ever give any donations? And don't think that donating your time to visit their site and use their software counts. It is probably safe to say most people won't donate any money for free downloads. This is where adware comes into play.

For the most part, where there is adware, there is money to be made. Since monetary contributions usually do not cover all of the costs from free downloads, advertisers are usually willing to contribute money. In return, they simply ask the download developers to bundle their adware with whatever they are offering. Since there are no other alternatives for the developer, (s)he agrees to bundle the adware.Having adware bundled with the initial software, you are then allowed to acquire the download for free.

How about that? Adware does in fact serve a positive aspect on the web. Whether or not you personally use free downloads, a lot of people do. Having said that, the next time you download something for free, remember that adware may be the cause of it.

Tags: Adware, Pop Up, Pop Ups

About the Author:
Josh George has been helping others protect themselves against adware and annoying pop-ups since 1998. His website contains free adware information, adware tools, and useful guides proven to help prevent annoying pop-ups from appearing on computers. If you want to learn how to help protect your own system from annoying adware, have a look at his site: Adware Resource.