One of my biggest concerns regarding the state of the web isn’t ads (easily blocked) or machine learning (the legal system isn’t going to be kind to that), but the possible demise of Firefox. I’ve long been worried that with the seemingly never-ending downward marketshare spiral Firefox is in – it’s at like 3% now on desktop, even less on mobile – Mozilla’s pretty much sole source of income will eventually pull the plug, leaving the already struggling browser effectively for dead. I’ve continuously been warning that the first casualty of the downward spiral would be Firefox on platforms other than Windows and macOS.
So, what do we make of Mozilla buying an online advertising analytics company?
Mozilla has acquired Anonym, a trailblazer in privacy-preserving digital advertising. This strategic acquisition enables Mozilla to help raise the bar for the advertising industry by ensuring user privacy while delivering effective advertising solutions.
↫ Laura Chambers
They way Mozilla explains buying an advertising network is that the company wants to be a trailblazer privacy-conscious online advertising, since the current brand of online advertising, which relies on massive amounts of data collection, is unsustainable. Anonym instead employs a number of measures to ensure that privacy is guaranteed, from anonymous analytics to employing differential privacy when it comes to algorithms, ensuring data can’t be used to tack individual users.
I have no reason to doubt Mozilla’s intentions here – at least for now – but intentions change, people in charge change, and circumstances change. Having an ad network integrated into the Mozilla organisation will surely lead to temptations of weakening Firefox’ privacy features and ad-blocking abilities, and just overall I find it an odd acquisition target for something like Mozilla, and antithetical to why most people use Firefox in the first place.
What really doesn’t help is who originally founded Anonym – two former Facebook executives, backed by a load of venture capital. Do with that little tidbit of information as you please.
My issue with this isn’t the ad company per-se, but the fact Mozilla is buying companies at all.
This is a foundation that not very long ago fired 5% of its workforce. Pleading poverty it said it wanted tk “prioritize resources against products like Firefox Mobile, where there’s a significant opportunity to grow and establish a better model for the industry.”
I wonder if instead of spending millions buying a company, it instead developed it core product, it wouldn’t be plummeting down the usage stats.
Adurbe,
The problem for mozilla is that all the commercial platforms are bundling their own browsers and only a minority of users will set out to change their browser. IOS users aren’t even allowed to select alternatives and I think this killed support for FF in a critical market for browsers.
I’d rather Mozilla not get into advertising. It’s bad optics and a conflict of interest that might result in browser compromises, just like some of google’s initiatives to add DRM and impede adblockers. However viewing this purely as a business decision… acquiring for profit businesses might not be the worst thing for mozilla. Most of us are uncomfortable admitting that money is important to FOSS, but money makes the world go around.
Alfman,
To change people’s default habits, being slightly better is usually not enough.
Firefox failed to deliver a clear advantage even on Android mobile phones, as Chrome was “good enough” for most tasks. And to be fair, Chrome was actually better in many other aspects as well (like desktop and mobile two way synchronization).
Again, this is a chicken and egg problem. Without resources you can’t deliver better features. And without better features, you can’t have marketshare to pay for those resources.
But I agree, ads on Firefox is bad optics.
sukru,
I agree. I think people can be convinced to change based on philosophical reasoning. However I suspect that the majority of users who who feel that alternatives browsers are important are already using one. In this isn’t going to add new users to FF numbers.
I’d kind of like to see what a browser could do with local AI since I feel that could open up new opportunities and innovation. But given the cold reception of AI in our circles, it would probably turn many people away.
Yeah.
Alfman,
Local AI is a very fast moving platform, and might be difficult to pin down long term APIs for the browsers. There are already some, like speech synthesis for accessibility, but we have speech recognition, image recognition, image synthesis, image segmentation, text analysis, text summarization, text generation, and of course “chat”.
But yes, eventually we might have APIs in the browser space.
FOSS does need money. But let’s not pretend Mozilla Foundation is some minnow scrapping together pennies. This is a foundation that generated near enough $500 Million of revenue last year..
Let’s contextualise that further. That revenue from a single year could sustain 4000 employees on $125k for a decade.
You could make a mighty fine Web browser for that kind of money and resources…. Instead they are spending/wasting millions on buying companies outside their core offerings.
Adurbe,
Their revenue from Google may not be sustainable, their own proper revenue streams are far lower. Still, how do you suggest mozilla they increasing the numbers?
I’ll flip that round. Why do they Need to?
Under the current model they can remain self-sustaining for multiple decades even without Google (based on their cash reserves).
They only have 100 or so perm staff and the bulk is then volunteers. Vivavldi (as a comparison) is half that size and is building a competitive offering (i grant you not its own rendering engine anymore).
There is this perverse concept that Mozzila Foundation (a non-profit) needs to earn more and more to be competitive. It doesn’t. It simply needs to spend the money it has on the core product it was created for.
Adurbe,
Why do they need to increase their numbers?
1) Without a critical mass of users, fewer websites will support alternative browsers. This is already starting to be a problem with some companies telling users to switch browsers. Having a larger user base gives us (as web developers, users, etc) a much stronger case for convince project managers that it’s important to support FF, whereas a niche browser is very easy for them to ignore. This is what happened with IE.
2) Without a strong user base, it becomes much easier to lock mozilla out of future web standards. Without users mozilla becomes irrelevant and their open web advocacy will be taken much less seriously. When alt-browser users become so niche that they become irrelevant, it significantly increases the likelihood that future attempts at web DRM and crippled browser extensions become the new norm. Compliant browsers may become prerequisite to accessing the web. Even if mozilla are invited to comply with google’s standards, it could very likely compromise mozilla’s mission.
You can argue they’re not spending their resources well, and that’s fair enough. But I do think they are desperate for a revenue stream that isn’t google and that’s been a challenge.
Adurbe,
Being self sustaining is probably, or rather, definitely not enough. Alfman touched a few topics, however there is also the issue of web being significantly more complex compared to older times.
It is no longer just rendering HTML and having a good score on Acid CSS tests. Web now is an entire application platform, with offline storage, caching, network protocols, image rendering, 3d rendering, access to sensors like accelerometers, memory management, game optimization, and whatnot.
They can’t just stay idle as the workload required to just “catch up” is increasing parabolically.
The question is why do they need to increase revenue. Not users. If 1/2 billion a year isn’t enough to build a modern browser then having that money from a diversified source won’t change that.
I’d suggest if you put out a new OSS project with a 1/2 billion budget you’d have to a viable alternative in a couple of years (probably written in rust knowing current trends). Remember all blink/webkit are are a fork of khtml a decade ago.
Open source can and has developed these platforms with Far smaller budgets avaliable
Adurbe,
I’m not disagreeing with you that maybe they could tighten their belts. But keep in mind most of that revenue is google money, not independent money. If mozilla wants to focus more on user’s privacy, most of that revenue disappears and potentially leads to more layoffs. Making money without google has proven to be very difficult for mozilla. I don’t know how to fix that. Acquiring for profit ad businesses would not have been my first choice, but it may be a path towards long term independence. I can’t say that I have better ideas.
They previously tried to build a web recommendation system, similar to Google Discover in the past. And it seemed to have not achieved the success they expected.
(Having first hand experience, I can attest that would not have been an easy task).
Prior to that, they tired to market Yahoo search as their main, and I might be mistaken, but there was something about a Bing collaboration, too.
And let’s not forget about online profile subscription.
Why am I listing these?
Mozilla definitely needs a stable income stream. Them being subsidized by Google and others only let’s them survive, but not thrive, and definitely not be a market challenger.
(They even had to shut down some efforts like a social media?, calendar, and other applications).
sukru,
The initiatives (or lack thereof) aren’t really the crux of mozilla’s problem. Everyone’s going to say mozilla should do this or that, but the real obstacle is staring everybody in the face: the competition is comprised of the world’s largest most powerful corporations. Microsoft, google, and apple are all multi-trillion dollar monopolies with nearly unlimited cash cows and vastly more access to consumers world wide. It’s not enough to build comparable or even a better browser. Even if mozilla does that it still isn’t close to being competitive on user access. To make things worse, mozilla’s base are a different breed of user, all attempts to monetize them has been met with fierce backlash.
I don’t think what’s hurting FF is the lack of ideas or initiative, but simply that everything they do involves fighting upwards from a weak position. Firefox OS was their best move to get out from underneath the competitor’s platform control, but obviously that failed against the google-apple duopoly (everyone else in that market failed as well). Mozilla are inevitably going to be blamed for failing to bring up FF numbers, and while that makes sense in the end I don’t think anyone else would be able to compete against the tech giants either. For better or worse market consolidation is the reality we live in.
The weakness of at least Google is that there’s a conflict of interest between delivering best possible user experience and it’s bread and butter ad business. There are limits to the extent this conflict could be resolved and the manifest v3 debacle shows that. This has event started to trickle down to it’s core search business.
Mozilla could have provide a key advantage if it have found way to serve adds in a way that doesn’t degrade user experience so much or perhaps gives user some degree of control in that regard (but without blatant blockage).
dsmogor,
We have gone through basically three generation of Internet ads:
1. The “Wild West”. In early days sites signed up with ad networks with almost no consideration wrt. the content, nor the user. Porn and other inappropriate ads were common.
2. “AdSense”, where the page content was used to generate relevant ads. So for example, when you landed on a page of an author like Stephen King, you’d most likely see ads for books or Amazon
3. “Personalized”, where the ads not only depended on the content, but more so on the user’s profile. This could be basic like “they are into video games” to more specific “they are shopping for a wedding, already bought a dress, probably searching for a cake”.
Obviously each one of these are producing much more relevant, and more profitable results compared to the priors. So, there is probably no going back to “unpersonalized” ads, unless you want to see much more of them (or have paywalls everywhere).
That might not be what you want to hear, but this is basically what the web economics has forced on us.
sukru,
What makes ads more appropriate than porn? Yeah yeah society labels porn as taboo, but I’d bet you that porn generates a much higher click through rate than “normal” advertising spam. If we weren’t looking through the lens of social biases then I think maybe the porn might genuinely be more relevant to users than the commercial spam that’s socially accepted. (Not that I like to be interrupted by either of them)
If you are on a site about X, and the site has ads about X, that makes sense. Companies have mostly stopped direct advertising to websites, but it’s too bad because IMHO this is the least invasive and offensive form of advertising.
Most people still hate these ads as much as ever. Not only is the very nature of these “personalized ads” intrusive, but ads being injected and being interrupted at every makes the web much less pleasant for almost all of us. When advertisers talk about personalized/relevant ads, it is not the user’s interests that ad platforms are optimizing for but rather the advertiser’s money. This is significant! Of course the assumption is that advertisers will limit the users who see their campaigns. But in reality a more “relevant” advertiser that bids too little money for a spot will get overlooked for a wealthier advertiser paying much more. Similarly organic results that are most likely what the user wants are typically displaced by spam. It’s normal to see completely irrelevant ads on youtube simply because a company like Burger King is running a big advertising campaign and their campaign goal is to spam everybody with their ads. For it’s part Google are more than happy to oblige them in exchange for the money.
I realize advertisers don’t like the reputation they have amongst the public, but it comes with the territory. As much as they might like to sugarcoat what they do, they will never get away from the association with spamming the web. It’s fundamentally what they do. Of course as long as businesses keep paying ad platforms, the business model will continue to flourish. If I were forced to pick an upside, it’s that advertising pays for services that would otherwise struggle to get revenue. But at the same time, running paid services has gotten harder now that it has to compete with ad based services.
Alfman,
The reason some publishers are overwhelming their sites with ads is they have too little traffic.
If you have staff writers, or even freelancers, and you cannot bring enough revenues, you won’t be able to pay them. However when your readership dwindles, you enter what is essentially a death spiral.
Say, your ad revenue with a reasonable layout is no longer paying your bills. You have two choices.
1) Enact a paywall
2) Increase ad density
None of them works, but the second one is usually preferred as it “prolongs the misery”.
(And “non personalized ads would make the situation even worse, as revenue will significantly decrease).
> I have no reason to doubt Mozilla’s intentions here – at least for now – but intentions change, people in charge change, and circumstances change.
The intentions of buying an ad company would be to make money from ads. This is inherently incompatible with user-centered product design, since by definition such a company is selling its users.
Mozilla siento the last 15 years wasting money in crap and it’s obvious that it’s direction uses it’s resources for its own private interests not Mozilla’s.
1st Mozilla might have only 3% but these are usually very valuable 3% from conscious and desirable customers. It’s play into “kosher” advertising that it could pitch to its customer base as a good compromise sustainable web without privacy fears could actually work if executed properly. The real asset it has right now is trust.
What I fear though is that it will force it to follow manifest v3 bs. One issue is privacy the other problem is how online ads degrade user experience. There shall be some solution to that too.
Obviously Mozilla needs to find other streams of revenue if it ever wants to challenge Google again and one thing is for sure, end users won’t pay directly, end users would rather use Chrome, regardless of the amount of privacy they need to give away for it.
And regardless of the amount of adds they will be forced to watch. Google can pretty much do anything, that won’t drive end users away to chose Firefox.
Its not bad per se, if they accomplish their mission and stay true to it. However, Its really just bringing back the old web which many here miss dearly, I get that. However, as time goes on I miss the advertising that worked on a local level better. I wonder how to get that back. The local shoe store advertises in a local newspaper, that then uses those funds to send a reporters to the zoning committee meetings, school board meetings, city council meetings, parks board meetings, waste water commission meetings. The reporters not only report on what’s going on, but serve as a check against corruption or mismanagement of those public bodies. Which kept many small towns on the level. What’s left now is just a unpaid blogger going in and trying to do everything themselves, and getting a platform for people to care about them. Not only was it more privacy focused, but the funds helped foster healthy city governments from the smallest up to the largest.
Bill Shooter of Bul,
I agree with everything you are saying. Smaller & local are more competitive and can better represent our needs, and ultimately less abusive. But I don’t think these things can come back. Like all the mom and pops that got replaced by big chains, they are gone forever. Like all the local news departments, they’ve consolidated over and over again and the little guys are gone forever. Like the rise of small ecommerce websites being replaced by the likes of amazon, the little guys are getting crushed. Whether we like it or not, this is what capitalism gets us. Like the laws of entropy, there’s no going backwards. Unless we administratively decide to break apart the giants and restart the game.
Spoiler alert: I’m biased
This is somewhat disappointing to see how the advertising on the Internet is subtly demonized here, and in other articles explicitely depicted as “wrong”, or “disrespectful” or “abusing” by definition. I work in the advertising business and, believe me or not, we don’t spend our life always seeking for new ways to abuse of users’ good faith, nor to find a way to distruct users’ privacy or to break the laws. I don’t even wear monocoles eheh.
The point is: there’s nothing wrong with (internet) advertising _per se_.
Advertising is just the way for the brands to be reached by the (potential) consumers. And assuming that data are collected accordingly to the privacy consents (which happens in the pratically totality of the cases, expecially in Europe. And, please, provide me evidence that I’m lying), targeted audience is just a way to push up potentially most interesting content for a given user among the huge mass of stimulus and irrelevant content for him.
And this is not for free: in exchange for advertising, lot of stuff on the Internet is free. So even those who cannot afford nor want to pay for content can consume it. I’m not saying that advertising is democracy ofc – it’s just marketing, not human rights. But paywalls are definitively less.
You may say that some publishers are abusive, because they sell an exaggerate amount of space in their inventory, or slap in your face invasive formats, disrupting your experience. This is true. Shame on the publisher, then, not the industry. And switch to another publisher, then, so they will learn the lesson. But please keep also in mind that very often the publisher sell the exact amount of inventory he needs to keep their business profitable.
You may also say that adverising is ruled by those GAMMA guys. This is true. But it’s not because of advertising that these companies became what they are. To fight this dominant position, start diversificating your experience, instead. Go to different communities, social networks, websites and forums to scramble the eggs.
Let me crystal clear: Adblocking is a PRIMARY right for any digital user of the 21st century and I will fight for this right until the grave. I also often do! 🙂
But pls consider for just 5 seconds if blocking every single banner you get, even those of the websites you trust, even those that seem relevant to your behaviours or interests, or simply those that seems just well-crafted, is the cure or it’s just part of the problem.
Well, it’s nice to read you realise you’re biased, but you don’t seem to realise how that affects your judgement… because this reads just like a regurgitation of everything the ad industry wants the general public to believe.
I still haven’t figured how to properly quote comments on here, so I won’t try and reply to everything you’ve written. Just that I believe a lot of people are working in good faith in trying to make advertising more responsible. Just as I’m trying to make capitalism more ethical in my workline. The end goal of capitalism is to amass more capital, which accentuates the imbalance between the higher ups and the practical slaves at the bottom (think outside of your own country, if you believe there are none). The end goal of advertisement is to manipulate people into buying something, whether they need it or not. There’s no amount of privacy protection or seemingly “free lunch” that will make that ethical. What makes the industry profitable is that the data amassed is not only used to sell stuff, but also to sell power over the masses. The idea that most of the ad industry is acting to profit the ad viewers is just preposterous. It might try to be more ethical, but it will always serve interests that are completely foreign to ours.
Yes, the powerful became powerful because the masses allowed them to. However the masses let them because they were manipulated into it. You might find this perfectly acceptable, and be entitled to that opinion. But it’s also perfectly fine to despise an industry that happily helps people with money gaining more power through their knowledge of how to stir opinions, even if it generates a lot of money and salaries (because, yes, that money hat to be spent by some poor lad in a way or another before it was paid to your employer).
If you want an ethical way to help poor people access information and other services and goods, it’s called redistribution, but that is quite frowned upon in our day and age. In my country, this is notably because the media companies are now more interested in having guest editorialists that please their announcers than real journalists that actually work for their audience.
You are criticizing capitalism. No, wait, let me use better words. You are “regurgitating”against capitalism (yes, i didn’t like this choice of words). This is fine, capitalism has a huge set of flaws and it’s not by far the best way to drive the world, expecially for the environment and expecially because this doesn’t redistribuite wealth equally. To be clear: _I’m not endorsing capitalism_. Expecially american capitalism.
But assuming that there is a secret order of nazi advertisers, aimed to manipulate masses, becauses masses by definition cannot think on their own is just conspiracy theories. The same is when assuming that advertisers “collect data to manipulate masses”. Why for the hell should they do?
Companies are not __evil__ by definitions. Companies make profit. This could be unethical, and certainly it is sometimes/often/very often. But, again, it’s politics, not marketing.
There is a brand that eventually wants to sell a product and there are potential customers which, for a very different set of reasons which are intimely personal, will decide they need it. Judging these reasons is disrespectful on their regards. Ppl are different. Some of them feel themselves good while having the latest iPhone in the pocket. One should ask himself why this happens in the modern society, instead of blaming a consent screen.
Advertising is perhaps a consequence of capitalism, not the cause. As I said already, advertising is just marketing. And marketing are the techniques that brands use to sell products. End of story.
Advertising doesn’t create the need. Society does.
My point, and I don’t see a response to it in your post, is that advertising costs money, someone has to pay for it, and in order for companies to need advertising, the advertisers have to bring so much more customer their own paycheck can be added to the base product cost. So, yes, the incentive to manipulate people into buying barely useful (or completely useless) stuff is there, and indeed, as an industry, advertisers have developed means to do that with boatloads of behavioural data. And this has nothing to do with a “secret order” or anything of the conspiracy sort: advertisers are certainly not ALL doing this, but they have that incentive as a collective of individual entities, even without a coordinated effort. This is not an opinion, we’ve had several blatant occasions to see it these last few years.
I’m not criticising capitalism as an idea either, just how in real life and mixed with advertisement, particularly on social media, it has created the means for anyone with a bit of money to sway public opinion. You can hide behind the idea the problem is society, but then, let’s take action as a society and legally ban personalised ads (among many other changes, which would be off-topic).
TheClue,
Let me ask you, in your view does the person being advertised to get a say in this or not? I know legally those being advertised to generally don’t get a say, but what about morally? Obviously we’re not talking about direct physical harm, but we’re absolutely talking about advertisers that effectively polluting our environments with more and more distractions and annoyances that ever before. Do advertisers have any accountability for forcing themselves on our senses or are they totally entitled in doing this? I suspect that, given what you are arguing for, that you believe those who aren’t part of the financial transaction don’t deserve a say in spite of the fact that it’s their senses being bombarded with unsolicited advertising. Right?
There seems to be a motive to justify unwanted web spam after the fact, but honestly it’s not what the advertisers were ever thinking. They really do not care if you are paying for the service or not. They just want to put their ads everywhere, and as long as advertisers are willing to pay for it, this trend of advertising in paid products and spaces is in all likelihood going to keep increasing. There’s already precedent for all of this, like $1 movies with no ads when I was growing up to movies today with 15 minutes of ads before the main feature despite costing about 1900% more. For better or worse, this is where advertisers are headed not because it’s necessary, but because there’s money to be had.
On the surface, this does not look good. From a business standpoint, this just might save the foundation. Aside from bringing in ad revenue, and the collapse of privacy in the browser, althewhile, Google may invest more into them as before. What if the purchase was just to acquire their IP and the mission is to open up their IP as FOSS, in order to allow for better ad blocking tech, thus preserving their original mission? Just thoughts that came to my mind when I read the article.