Content on the web is powerful. It enables us to learn new things, discover different perspectives, stay in touch with what’s happening in the world, or just make us laugh. Making sure that stories like these – stories that are worth your time and attention – are discoverable and supported is central to what we care about at Pocket.
It’s important for quality content like this to thrive – and a critical way it’s funded is through advertising. But unfortunately, today, this advertising model is broken. It doesn’t respect user privacy, it’s not transparent, and it lacks control, all the while starting to move us toward low quality, clickbait content.
We believe the Internet can do better. So earlier this year, we started to explore a new model and showed an occasional sponsored story in Pocket’s recommendation section on Firefox New Tab. Starting today, we’re expanding this work further – now Firefox Nightly and Beta users may also see these sponsored stories. We’re preparing for this feature to go fully live in May to Firefox users in the US with the Firefox 60 release.
Luckily, you can turn this off.
You think the advertising model is broken and you intend to solve this by… feeding us more paid advertising? Um… does not compute.
Fortunately I switched away from Firefox a while back when they tried to sneak studies back in despite my having opted out of them initially.
darknexus,
There’s definitely some hypocrisy over there, but short of having a mark shuttleworth to fund the operation, how should open source projects like mozilla get funding? Ideally donations would be enough, but in practice I’m not so sure it is and many open source projects are in financial hardship. Charging for FF would just about guaranty it’s demise.
In an industry littered with failed business models, it’s clear that ads are an effective way to raise money. Are ads a necessary evil if the alternative would be to shut down? What other business model might work for mozilla? I imagine that, like us, people within mozilla probably hate ads too and would love to have a viable alternative…so what is the alternative?
I for one, don’t know.
Edited 2018-05-01 18:08 UTC
The other competition is Microsoft and Google. They are not primarily Web Browser developers, they have their hands in many a cookie jar. I suggest that Mozilla broadens their company. But Microsoft and Google both use advertisers… so I don’t have a solution either really.
Mozilla is not exactly cash strapped, they are making half a billion per year even after fruitlessly spending on Firefox OS.
They make a ton of money on being the default search provider and from taking advantage of Yahoo’s bad contract lawyers.
I have been a loyal Firefox user for a long time. The only reason I didn’t switch is because there was no hint of advertising. But lately they are emitting all the wrong signals, including fuckups like Pocket and first page content.
Mozilla has to be careful, I might jump to a fork of FF if this nonsense continuous.
Wondercool,
You may be right about the public sentiment. Mozilla has able to keep distance between itself and advertising by getting paid indirectly through google/yahoo. Mozilla’s view has been that their extreme dependence on these advertising companies isn’t good for the mozilla foundation, but I guess that’s open to debate.
I am like you, I don’t want to hear about browser makers being in bed with advertisers at all. But seeing as this has been the case for several years anyways, it could make sense to ask if the status quo is the best arrangement for users?
What are the tradeoffs between having optional ads inhouse versus outsourcing them to google/yahoo? I think mozilla is right that outsourcing ad revenue to the likes of google has been especially bad for user privacy. Mozilla could clearly do a better job than google. On the other hand, serving ads inhouse has terrible optics regardless of their stated goal of protecting user privacy. Either way, having to rely on advertisers to pay the bills sucks, the question may be which model sucks the least for users?
And people are bitching about Facebook. Firefox/Moziila are becoming just as bad with this kind of crap and quite frankly need to be subjected to the same kind of regs in fact not more so that people are talking about for Facebook and goggle.
They tried this a few years ago, then abandoned it.
https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-officially-kicks-off-ads-in-firefo…
Considering they’re the only truly open source modern browser option on windows, I’d happily jump on it for direct funding, like I find VLC.
Who would’ve thunk that Richard Stallman was WAY ahead of his time even if sounding crazy.
“Making sure that stories like these – stories that are worth your time and attention – are discoverable and supported”
Propaganda is information that is not objective and is used primarily to influence an audience and further an agenda.
Persuasion used to increase or maintain market share falls under marketing, not propaganda.
…for now. Why Mozilla insists on continuing down a path of user hostility boggles the mind. For now I’m using Waterfox but it doesn’t support all the platforms I use so it’s only a short term solution. I guess it’s time to start browser hopping again.
You can indeed. https://www.palemoon.org/
(Note that Palemoon doesn’t have Privacy Badger available for it.)
Between this and their drop of support for the ALSA sound framework, I’ve finally had to give up on Firefox. 🙁