Mozilla drops Sponsored Tile advertisement in Firefox

[Batu69]

Mozilla's VP of Content Services Darren Herrman announced yesterday on the official Mozilla Blog that the organization made the decision to discontinue Sponsored Tiles in the Firefox web browser.

The controversial feature was announced back in early 2014 and integrated into Nightly versions later that year.

It replaced some of the suggestions displayed on the New Tab Page of Firefox with sponsored entries, but only for new users or users who have deleted the browsing history (and so returned to the state where the New Tab Page is prepopulated with sites).

While the majority of Firefox users may have never been exposed to these tiles because of that, the backlash from the community was huge.

Sponsored Tile ads

That must have come as a surprise to the people responsible at Mozilla, especially since the organization implemented options to disable sponsored tiles in the browser and Mozilla's public statement that it would not share personal information with publishers.

My opinion back then was that the feature was not worth it, not from a revenue point of view but also not when you take into account the damage to Mozilla's reputation (they claim they fight for user privacy and now they display ads in Firefox? What's next?).

The move to end Sponsored Tile advertisements in Firefox is a logical consequence of that. Herrman makes no mention of why Mozilla decided to drop it, other than that "users want content that is relevant, exciting and engaging".

It is very likely that revenue played a major role in the decision, especially when weighted against the community's opinion on the feature and the reaction of the press.

That does not mean that things will go back to normal though. Apparently, Mozilla wants to focus on "content discovery" in the future instead.

We have therefore made the decision to stop advertising in Firefox through the Tiles experiment in order to focus on content discovery.

It is likely that Suggested Sites, another type of tiles that may show up on the New Tab Page, fall into that category.

Mozilla never revealed how Firefox picked the suggestions. The most likely explanation is that it uses the same technology that the experimental Personal Interest Dashboard add-on is using.

To sum it up: Sponsored Tiles are removed from Firefox once all booked campaigns run out. Mozilla wants to concentrate on content discovery instead making it likely that we are going to see new additions to that in future Firefox versions. Whether that will be like Opera's Discovery feature or something completely different is still unclear.

News source

[VileTouch]

first thing i do after installing firefox is decrapifying it of ads, telemetry and thumnail surveillance anyway. besides there are far better options for a start page (speed dial, super start,file://c:/start.html)

[dcs18]

Mozilla drops Sponsored Tile advertisement in Firefox

Makes absolutely no difference to me — I'm sure it won't mean a thing to some others too, who know how to prevent the same. :dunno:

[rudrax]

Mozilla drops Sponsored Tile advertisement in Firefox

Makes absolutely no difference to me I'm sure it won't mean a thing to some others too, who know how to prevent the same. :dunno:

This isn't the case here. Mozilla has dropped Google search and now this. What does this indicates?

-either they have found enough resources to run mozilla foundation forever or they are going to quit.

[dcs18]

Mozilla drops Sponsored Tile advertisement in Firefox

Makes absolutely no difference to me I'm sure it won't mean a thing to some others too, who know how to prevent the same. :dunno:

This isn't the case here. Mozilla has dropped Google search and now this. What does this indicates?

-either they have found enough resources to run mozilla foundation forever or they are going to quit.

Again, resourceful folks won't be bothered — they most probably would be enjoying their very own custom Google Search. 8)

FWIW, I don't believe Mozilla has any plans to quit on Firefox.

[steven36]

first thing i do after installing firefox is decrapifying it of ads, telemetry and thumnail surveillance anyway. besides there are far better options for a start page (speed dial, super start,file://c:/start.html)

What the OP fails to say the guy that was over the ads idea Darren Herman, is quitting Mozilla .That don’t mean they may not put them back one day it just depends or something else .

"We have ... made the decision to stop advertising in Firefox through the Tiles experiment in order to focus on content discovery," wrote Darren Herman, Mozilla's vice president of content services, in a post to a Mozilla blog Friday. Herman, a former advertising executive and venture capitalist, joined Mozilla in 2013 to kick-start the in-browser ad project.

"Advertising in Firefox could be a great business, but it isn't the right business for us at this time because we want to focus on core experiences for our users," Herman continued. "We want to reimagine content experiences and content discovery in our products."

However, Herman didn't permanently shut Firefox's advertising door. "Mozilla will continue to explore ways to bring a better balance to the advertising ecosystem for everyone's benefit, and to build successful products that respect user privacy and deliver experiences based upon transparency, choice and control," he said.

If Mozilla does at some point return to the in-browser ad idea, it will be without Herman: On Friday, he announced he is leaving Mozilla at the end of the month.

http://www.computerworld.com/article/3012198/web-browsers/mozilla-scraps-in-firefox-ads.html

This means they paid someone for 2 years for a idea that wasn’t working that was not giving them a profit a big waste of money really. I use disconnect search for my homepage It lets me search through google ,duckduckgo and bing with disconnect . ;)