Nobody likes Zango, and with good reason. The spyware company–or to put it more politely, “adware distributor,” operated by sneaking software onto PCs to deliver ads. The company closed its doors after being bought by Blinx, a video search engine.

Zango claimed that deceptive installations had long since stopped. Much of the controversy about Zango revolved around users getting inadequate information about “opting out” from the download. The company blamed the problems on its affiliates that used security vulnerabilities in browsers to download the Zango software to unsuspecting victims. Ultimately, the company failed because of its poor reputation as a spyware vendor, and that is and should be the nature of the Internet business. The company was attempting to position itself as legitimate, but increasingly, its business partners wanted to distance themselves from the company to protect their own reputation. The end result of all this is that the message has been reinforced that this is not a legitimate business model.

The company, which started out as 180 Solutions, had initially raised $40 million in venture capital–again perhaps testimony to poor due diligence on the part of venture capitalists who failed to foresee what sort of mischief this company had in mind or was capable of perpetrating. Throughout its history, security companies listed Zango’s software as adware, and Zango unsuccessfully sued two of them over their listings. The end of Zango is significant, because it really marks the end of the adware model, at least the pretense that it is a legitimate business. Other adware companies, such as Gator and DirectRevenue, have also long since gone out of business; Zango is the last one in a long line of briefly profitable but ultimately unsuccessful adware companies.