{"id":7696,"date":"2014-06-08T09:20:37","date_gmt":"2014-06-08T13:20:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/?p=7696"},"modified":"2014-06-08T09:20:37","modified_gmt":"2014-06-08T13:20:37","slug":"going-broke-or-not-we-will-never-sell-you-out-for-money","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/going-broke-or-not-we-will-never-sell-you-out-for-money\/","title":{"rendered":"Going Broke or Not, We Will Never Sell You Out for Money"},"content":{"rendered":"

Many of you have responded to our article about Avast<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/span>. A few of you have hinted at or just full-out accused us of writing the article about Avast to increase sales of Emsisoft.<\/p>\n

First let me say – that is not true. It would absolutely insane for us to recommend something that didn’t work, or to recommend something that had a price tag when there is something free that does the job just as well. We are never going to do that. We based that article on facts not wishful thinking, hyperbole, or greed. We showed scan results from on computer protected by Avast — but we could have show scans from many other computers, supposedly protected, by Avast, which were just as badly infected with malware.<\/p>\n

We have been around since 1996 and we have never once recommended anything out of greed, even though many times we have walked on the precipice of going out of business.<\/p>\n

We have been offered commissions as high as 75% \u00a0by other antivirus companies (including Norton) to recommend their security suite. This happened several years ago. If \u00a0our motivation were to make money and leave our readers in the lurch we would have recommended Norton, because 75% of $70 is a pretty hefty commission. And heaven knows we need the money — but we are not going to sell out and start recommending things just because we can make money on it.<\/p>\n

Everything we’ve ever recommended is something we use or would use if we had the need for it. We recommended Microsoft Security Essentials for several years — it’s free. And we stopped recommending it, not because Emsisoft came along, but because Microsoft had literally let every one of its MSE users down. It went from a top-ten antivirus to the bottom or near the bottom of the list of 25. That’s a fact – not conjecture. It’s not our wishful thinking or our greed that made us stop recommending MSE. We stopped using it because it had gone from being a great anti-virus program to a poor anti-virus program. Yes it’s still free: Do you want free software or do you want to be protected?<\/p>\n

We recommended Malwarebytes (free version) for years and years. And we’ll tell you the truth — we would not have stopped recommending Malwarebytes if Malwarebytes had not left all their users in the lurch by suddenly deciding not to detect or remove the most pervasive and obnoxious malware. We would have never stopped recommending them if they had not secretly violated their users (and our) trust. Again, this is based on facts. We tried, for a long time, to get Malwarebytes to stop letting its users down and return\u00a0to being the great anti-malware program they once were. We wrote to them, we wrote articles about this, and we even supported them for a while during this time and gave them the benefit of the doubt — we gave them time to fix Malwarebytes. Again these are facts.<\/p>\n

Read this article “What’s Going On With Malwarebytes”<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/em> written June 7, 2013.<\/p>\n

Or this article<\/a><\/em>,<\/strong><\/span>\u00a0first published on June 22, 2013. Or this one, entitled: “Malwarebytes: The End of the Line<\/a><\/strong><\/span>“<\/em>– written on July 12, 2013.<\/p>\n

We gave Malwarebytes a month to fix their program. Only because of the failure of Malwarebytes (free version) to fix their once-great program, did we begin testing other anti-malware programs. After exhausting the list of free anti-malware programs – some of which were ironically malware themselves – we found Emsisoft. \u00a0We started testing it right after we realized that Malwarebytes was probably not going to respond to its customers’ or our pleas to stop selling out to multi-billion-dollar malware-makers like ASK.com and Conduit — practically begging Malwarebytes to forget greed and protect the millions of people, \u00a0including us, who relied on them for protection from malware.<\/p>\n

We tested Emsisoft for several weeks on our test computer and we threw everything at it we could find. Then, before we announced our recommendation, we put it on our own work and personal computers. We had our friends and family members test it too. We found nothing else that even came close to Emsisoft when it came to protection from malware – and it was pure serendipity that Emsisoft turned out to be one of the best anti-viruses too.<\/p>\n

We contacted Emsisoft during our testing and asked questions, and they immediately answered them. We were impressed: Not only did they have a great program, they actually were great people who were willing to go out of their way to answer our questions and address our concerns. We figured if they were that responsive to us, they’d be responsive to our customers as well.<\/p>\n

It doesn’t matter if we make a commission on Emsisoft or if we’re a reseller. We would have never recommended it if it wasn’t the best anti-malware \/ anti-virus we have found. We could have made tens of thousands of dollars recommending unnecessary firewalls or selling McAfee or Norton or Trend Micro of many of the others.<\/p>\n

We recommended AVG at one time until it lied to its users and tried to trick them into upgrading to the pro version by saying they were not going to offer a free version anymore. They backtracked that, but they also became a company we didn’t trust and still don’t. And while their antivirus may be acceptable – their antimalware component is very poor. In fact, AVG installers emulate malware by trying to get you to use AVG Safe Search and install a\u00a0useless\u00a0AVG toolbar . We pulled our recommendation of AVG and the recommended Avast, which was also free.<\/p>\n

Avast grew more and more bloated trying to \u00a0be another Norton and Web of Trust (WOT) and an anti-spam, too. It became so bloated and annoying, we stopped recommending it when Microsoft finally released a great anti-virus called Microsoft Security Essentials (called Windows Defender in Windows 8.1). MSE was free and we recommended it until last fall when independent lab test showed it had fallen from a top-five antivirus program to a bottom-five antivirus program. MSE is still languishing near or at the bottom of \u00a0the heap of antivirus.<\/p>\n

For a while we recommend but MSE and Emsisoft (as an anti-malware) until we became aware that Emsisoft was not only winning awards for its anti-malware component but also for its antivirus component. That, combined with the continuing decline in the effectiveness of MSE ended our recommendation of MSE — and our recommendation of Emsisoft as our number one choice for anti-malware and antivirus.<\/p>\n

Emsisoft is the first antimalware\/antivirus we’ve ever recommended that is not free. If there were a free antivirus\/antimalware which were as good, or even nearly as good, we would have recommended it.<\/p>\n

Regardless of some of the comments we have gotten to our Avast article — we don’t make decisions based on how much money we could make. If we did, Darcy and I would be millionaires many times over. In the days when Cloudeight Stationery was the number one stationery site on the Internet – we welcomed over eight million visitors a year. We averaged 10,000 downloads a day and during holidays as many as 50,000 a day. We could have bundled our stationery with malware and made 50 cents to a dollar a download – but we never did that.<\/p>\n

We could have recommended Norton, Kaspersky, Sophos, McAfee, Vipre, Zone Alarm and others, \u00a0instead of the free antivirus programs we recommended from 1998 through 2013. That’s 15 years we could have been making money recommending antivirus programs and firewalls — but we didn’t.<\/p>\n

We are never going to recommend something just to make money even if it means the end of our company. \u00a0We would rather close up shop than violate the trust of our readers — and we have proven that many times.<\/p>\n

We have never sold you\u00a0out for money; we are not going to start now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Many of you have responded to our article about Avast. A few of you have hinted at or just full-out accused us of writing the article about Avast to increase sales of Emsisoft. First let me say – that is not true. It would absolutely insane for us to recommend something that didn’t work, or to recommend something\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7696"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7696"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7696\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7697,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7696\/revisions\/7697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}