Mozilla ditches Firefox ad tiles experiment
It can be hard enough to avoid advertising online, and Mozilla has been experimenting with yet another way to pull in money. The Tiles experiment has been running for a few months and saw ads brought to the Firefox homepage via, funnily enough, tiles.
The company has decided that the experiment is a failure, and now wants to shift its focus to delivering "relevant, exciting and engaging" content to users instead. Mozilla has been scrambling to find way to make its browser bring in the pennies, but admits that "advertising in Firefox [...] isn't the right business for us at this time".
Moving forward the aim is "to reimagine content experiences and content discovery in our products" while continuing to explore different ways to balance advertising for the benefit of users and advertisers alike. Mozilla says it wants to deliver choice-based user experiences while respecting privacy and maintaining transparency.
Writing on the Mozilla blog, VP of Content Services Darren Herman says:
Our learnings show that users want content that is relevant, exciting and engaging. We want to deliver that type of content experience to our users, and we know that it will take focus and effort to do that right.
We have therefore made the decision to stop advertising in Firefox through the Tiles experiment in order to focus on content discovery. We want to thank all the partners who have worked with us on Tiles. Naturally, we will fulfil our current commitments as we wind down this experiment over the next few months.
Photo credit: Evan Lorne / Shutterstock