In addition, the upstart is announcing that it has raised early-stage funding ($250k) from Seattle’s Founder Co-op and a dozen angel investors, many of which are local Internet/tech CEOs.

The whole idea behind BigDoor is that online monetization can be improved through technology, enabling publishers to get more money out of website visitors, game players, etc. by catering custom offers to them rather than traditional display and text advertising – contextually delivered or not. The company markets a so-called ‘Offer Platform’, a private label solution that publishers can integrate with an existing site or application with just a single line of code that can be delivered within 24 hours in most cases according to BigDoor.

Publishers can use the tool to determine how their users interact with existing offers, and control the look and feel of the experience to complement their website and/or mobile application. BigDoor claims its technology can guarantee ad rates above the $1.50 to $2.00 eCPM range for most publishers.

BigDoor Media was founded by CEO Keith Smith and Jeff Malek. Notably, these two men previously started Zango (formerly ePIPO, 180solutions and Hotbar) back in the nineties, a venture that was and still is associated heavily with spyware and adware. The company ran into trouble with the FTC, and was forced to close its doors mainly because of those issues. The story is neatly chronicled here by Computerworld and on Xbiz.

The founders openly acknowledge the associations in the ‘About Us’ section, admitting that in the last decade they’ve made “countless mistakes”, and in this lengthy but must-read blog-post. Their past didn’t stop investors from financing the company, so it wouldn’t be fair for us to crucify BigDoor Media beforehand because of it either.

If you’re a publisher or advertiser and try out the public beta, let us know what your experience with the startup’s solution is.

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Smart Shopper offers what on the surface appears to be a fairly non-threatening shopping assistant add on for Internet Explorer, however according to a number of sites is really adware that does nothing more than deliver advertisements and is difficult to remove.

Zango has a long history in the spyware business, having faced numerous court challenges over its business tactics whilst attempting to get in on the social networking and social shopping craze. Zango offers free games to MySpace users that according to our July 2006 report, results in users installing a spyware toolbar as well.

Smart Shopper Networks was previously owned by New York based HotBar Inc, another company that comes up as a spyware producer according to a search of Google.

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Christopher Boyd of Vitalsecurity argues that this is particularly pernicious because it exploits the trust that MySpace’s young users have for the MySpace admin. He believes that a popup while on MySpace asking for permission to do anything will be presumed to originate from MySpace officially. This could well be.

This is, of course, only the newest addition to the small army of services becoming available to mine the huge userbase that is MySpace for shady commercial purposes. I know I get friend requests from fake, or at least very shallow seeming, women all the time – and I don’t think it’s because they saw my name on TechCrunch.

Pop-ups and adware are probably one of the most hated parts of the web for PC/IE users and the direction that this could take MySpace is truly terrible. MySpace themselves really ought to deal with this before the site’s reputation takes another big hit.

This also has the potential to damage the reputation of MySpace widgets and gadgets in general. How possible is it that users will simply stop embedding video from off site if the practice becomes associated with the installation of adware? The specific details are almost not even important, there is a real risk of guilt by association.