What the advertiser's Avast listing states, and what it leaves unanswered

What the listing actually states

An advertiser's listing is a short commercial document written for publishers, not for readers. The one AdeptBase holds for this product contains four substantive statements, reproduced below in the left column with what each does and does not establish beside it.

The arrangement also excludes referrals from a number of countries. AdeptBase is written for readers in Australia, which is within scope, and the exclusions are mentioned only because a complete description of the relationship includes them.

What the listing does not contain

The following are absent from the advertiser's material, and are therefore absent from this site. Where other pages appear to supply them, the source of that information is the vendor or a testing organisation, not this one.

• No price and no currency. There is no figure in AUD or any other currency, no discount, no term length and no renewal price, so none appears here.
• No edition or feature breakdown. The listing does not say what any particular edition contains, whether a free tier exists, or which components accompany the scanner.
• No system requirements. Platform names are given; supported versions, memory, disk space and processor requirements are not.
• No test results or scores. No detection rate, no false positive rate, no performance measurement, no award, and no reference to any testing laboratory.
• No data handling detail. What the product transmits during a cloud lookup, how long it is retained and where it is processed are not addressed.
• No support or refund terms. Contact routes, response times, refund windows and cancellation procedures are all outside the listing.

That list is longer than the one above it, which is the honest shape of this page. A publisher in this position can either invent the missing material or name it as missing, and naming it is the only option compatible with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's position that a publisher is accountable for the representations it makes in trade.

Getting the missing answers yourself

Every item in the previous section is available from the vendor, and checking takes a few minutes. The order below puts the things that most often cause regret first.

1. Open the vendor's edition comparison and identify the exact edition you are looking at. Vendors sell several tiers under one name, and coverage written elsewhere frequently describes a different tier.
2. Find the renewal price as well as the first-term price, and note where automatic renewal is switched off. Both are usually in the subscription terms linked from the purchase page.
3. Check the system requirements page against your actual computer, including the operating system version, not just its name.
4. Read the privacy documentation for the product, specifically what is sent to the vendor's servers during scanning and what is retained.
5. Confirm the device count and whether the licence permits business use if the machine is used for work. Consumer editions are generally licensed for personal use.
6. Note the refund window and how to start a refund before purchase, and keep the receipt somewhere other than the computer it protects.

These are the same six checks recommended for any vendor on choosing protection. They are not specific to this product, and nothing about the commercial relationship changes them.

What an advertiser's listing is, and why it is so thin

Readers rarely see these documents, so it is worth saying what kind of thing is being quoted above. An advertiser's listing is an internal commercial notice circulated to publishers by an advertising network. Its purpose is to tell a publisher what is being promoted, which action earns a commission, and which methods of promotion are not permitted. It is not product documentation, it is not written for consumers, and it is not reviewed by the vendor's technical staff.

That explains its shape. A listing is precise about the commercial terms — the qualifying action, the excluded traffic, the excluded countries — and vague to the point of silence about the software, because the network is not the vendor and does not undertake to describe the product accurately. A publisher who treats such a document as a product specification will produce something that reads authoritative and is not.

The rule this site applies, in one sentence: an advertiser's listing is reliable evidence about the arrangement and weak evidence about the product, so it is quoted for the first and not relied on for the second. Anything on any website that reads like detailed product knowledge should prompt the same question a reader might ask here — where did the publisher get it, and can the reader check the same source.

The link itself

The button below goes directly to the advertiser's tracked address for the vendor's site. It is not routed through this domain, there is no intermediate page, and no script alters where it goes: the destination visible in the browser's status bar is the destination you reach.