Reuters:
Mozilla, the company behind the Firefox Internet browser, will start selling ads as it tries to grab a larger slice of the fast-expanding online advertising market.
The company said in a blog posting on Tuesday that it has reached out to potential corporate sponsors about its fledgling “Directory Tiles” program, targeted at first-time users.
When I read the news (via Daring Fireball), I was very surprised. Mozilla helped lead the charge on changing how online advertisers can track users, and is seen by parts of the online community as a sort of refuge from Google, which makes a majority of its income from online ads.
Here’s a blog post from just four months ago by Alex Fowler, Mozilla’s Global Privacy & Public Policy Lead:
At Mozilla, we believe privacy and security are fundamental and cannot be ignored. It’s enshrined in our Manifesto. However, we prefer to skip the platitudes, white papers, and insider deals; choosing, instead, to drive change through our code. Industry groups and policy makers had been debating Do Not Track for years before we showed up, wrote 30 lines of code, and gave it — for free — to hundreds of millions of Firefox users. Within a year, all of the other major browsers followed our lead. We saw the same thing happen when we killed the annoying pop-up ad. And we’re doing it again, together with members of our contributor community, testing new approaches to cookies, personalization and more.
That emphasis isn’t mine — it’s in the original blog post. However, in this blog post, Mozilla’s VP of Content Services Darren Herman writes:
We will use GeoIP to ensure Tiles content is relevant to the user’s location, just as we recognize where a visitor to our homepage came from so we can localize the language, but no other user information is collected or considered.
I don’t think it’s hard to see the struggle here. For this to be profitable, Mozilla needs its new ads to be effective, but so much of the company’s identity has been wrapped up in defending users against such practices.
That said, most of Mozilla’s income comes from search deals from Google, Microsoft and others. I wonder how Google will respond to this news, as its relationship with Mozilla is only guaranteed through this year.
While my guess is that Herman is telling the truth, I’m not sure it matters all that much. Perception is everything; if users see ads in Firefox, they will assume the worst. I just don’t see how this is going to end well.