Re: sponsored new tab tiles - please tell me this is a (bad) joke

[Pascal Chevrel]

Le 12/02/2014 08:42, Jim Porter a écrit :
> On 02/11/2014 07:26 PM, Zack Weinberg wrote:
>> regarding
>> https://blog.mozilla.org/advancingcontent/2014/02/11/publisher-transformation-with-users-at-the-center/
>>
>> :
>>
>>> Directory Tiles will instead suggest pre-packaged content for
>>> first-time users. Some of these tile placements will be from the
>>> Mozilla ecosystem, some will be popular websites in a given
>>> geographic location, and some will be sponsored content from
>>> hand-picked partners to help support Mozilla’s pursuit of our
>>> mission. The sponsored tiles will be clearly labeled as such,
>>> while still leading to content we think users will enjoy.
>
> Thanks for bringing this up; I probably wouldn't have seen it otherwise.
> To be perfectly honest, this is the kind of announcement that makes me
> seriously wonder how this idea managed to survive long enough to get
> published as an announcement. While it's perfectly legitimate to say
> that the new tab page sucks for a new Firefox profile, was there really
> no one who said "hey wait a minute, maybe we should be really careful
> before we start talking about putting ads into the actual browser"
> before this post was published?
>
> I obviously wasn't involved in any internal discussion with "Directory
> Tiles", but I'm hoping that this is something that was already fairly
> well-known amongst Firefox Desktop devs. If not, there is a Problem.
> There have been occasions at Mozilla where I had a vague suspicion that
> someone who wanted a controversial feature simply chose not to mention
> the feature to relevant parties who might object on privacy/ethical/etc
> grounds; I sincerely hope this was only my paranoia speaking, and not
> the truth of the matter. The same applies to this situation as well.
>
> If indeed this happened without relevant people being in the loop, we
> need to come up with ways to prevent that. For my part, I've always
> tried to run my crazier ideas past a few people before posting it
> somewhere more public to help prevent embarrassment (both for myself and
> Mozilla as a whole).
>
> This sort of thing has the potential to erode the trust of not only our
> users, but our contributors (and employees!).
>
> - Jim


Hi

I think this thread should be cross-posted to mozilla.governance (doing
that on this reply) as this is not just an implementation issue but a
discussion about what Mozilla values are and how these values impact our
products.

I share the same concerns although I would like to know the details of
the implementation before dismissing it. For example if we get a couple
of sponsored ads on the first time a new user uses the new tab feature
and that this feature is not based on any communication of the user's
data, I think I would be OK with that. For me the touchy point from a
moral point of view for Mozilla is the user's personal data, not ads per
se. If we don't leak to advertisers any of the user data to display a
sponsored tile, then I think it's ok with our values to show an ad once
or twice on this page.

Of course by preserving the user's privacy, we can't provide details
allowing more targetted ads for which advertisers would pay more, but on
the other hand we don't need to make such compromises to maximize
revenue, especially since we wouldn't be an intermediary (as we are with
our search engine partners) and would therefore get the direct full
payment for the sponsored ads.

So to give an example, if a new French Firefox user sees the first time
he uses Firefox a tile about let's say a popular online shop in French
speaking countries (like fnac.com for example), and that we selected
this ad for the French Firefox build, then I think it's OK as we are not
basing this ad on the user's data.

If we intend to show tiles based on the user's data (browing, settings
in preferences...) then I think that it is a lot more touchy and that it
needs a wider discussion with all of Mozilla to make decisions based on
what is good for Mozilla in the long run and not what seems good on the
short term.

Regards,

Pascal

[Benjamin Kerensa]

I have to say right now on Google+ and on other Social Media networks there
are lots of people not taking the announcement well. I would say this is
impacting at least a minority of our users feelings about Firefox.

A quick search of Google News shows 23 articles that talk in a negative
light about the blog post by Darren.

Here are some choice picks:
http://adage.com/article/special-report-iab-annual-meeting/mozilla-sell-ads-firefox/291641/
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-57618750-92/mozilla-to-sell-new-tab-page-ads-in-firefox/
http://consumerist.com/2014/02/11/mozilla-goes-from-blocking-third-party-ads-by-default-to-displaying-ads-within-firefox/

It would be helpful to clarify what kind of sponsored content users might
see either way my concern is this could rub some users the wrong way and
they may go to other browsers as a result.

It seems like it would have been better to hold off on blogging about this
until some definitive examples could be provided.

[Rubén Martín]

Hi,

One of the things that were mentioned was that these promoted titles would
be curated content relevant for users and following our principles.

For example, most of us would feel wrong to promote sites like Facebook or
others that we know for sure that are tracking and not respecting user
privacy.

Site reputation audited by a third party should be a requirement for the
"following our principles" and locale team approval for "relevant for the
users".

Regards.
--
Rubén Martín (Nukeador)
Mozilla Reps Mentor
http://mozilla-hispano.org
http://twitter.com/mozilla_hispano
http://facebook.com/mozillahispano

[Dirkjan Ochtman]

On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 9:29 AM, Benjamin Kerensa <bker...@gmail.com> wrote:
> http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-57618750-92/mozilla-to-sell-new-tab-page-ads-in-firefox/

This doesn't seem actually very negative, as I read it. Am I reading
it that differently?

Cheers,

Dirkjan

[Gijs Kruitbosch]

On 12/02/2014 07:42, Jim Porter wrote:
> On 02/11/2014 07:26 PM, Zack Weinberg wrote:
>> regarding
>> https://blog.mozilla.org/advancingcontent/2014/02/11/publisher-transformation-with-users-at-the-center/
>>
>> :
>>
>>> Directory Tiles will instead suggest pre-packaged content for
>>> first-time users. Some of these tile placements will be from the
>>> Mozilla ecosystem, some will be popular websites in a given
>>> geographic location, and some will be sponsored content from
>>> hand-picked partners to help support Mozilla’s pursuit of our
>>> mission. The sponsored tiles will be clearly labeled as such,
>>> while still leading to content we think users will enjoy.
>
> Thanks for bringing this up; I probably wouldn't have seen it otherwise.
> To be perfectly honest, this is the kind of announcement that makes me
> seriously wonder how this idea managed to survive long enough to get
> published as an announcement. While it's perfectly legitimate to say
> that the new tab page sucks for a new Firefox profile, was there really
> no one who said "hey wait a minute, maybe we should be really careful
> before we start talking about putting ads into the actual browser"
> before this post was published?
>
> I obviously wasn't involved in any internal discussion with "Directory
> Tiles", but I'm hoping that this is something that was already fairly
> well-known amongst Firefox Desktop devs.

It was presented and discussed at the Firefox desktop work week in
Paris, early January. There were many other ideas that were shot down
well before they were even shown to the Fx desktop team.

> If not, there is a Problem.
> There have been occasions at Mozilla where I had a vague suspicion that
> someone who wanted a controversial feature simply chose not to mention
> the feature to relevant parties who might object on privacy/ethical/etc
> grounds; I sincerely hope this was only my paranoia speaking, and not
> the truth of the matter. The same applies to this situation as well.
>
> If indeed this happened without relevant people being in the loop, we
> need to come up with ways to prevent that. For my part, I've always
> tried to run my crazier ideas past a few people before posting it
> somewhere more public to help prevent embarrassment (both for myself and
> Mozilla as a whole).
>
> This sort of thing has the potential to erode the trust of not only our
> users, but our contributors (and employees!).
>
> - Jim

As Bryan Clark put it on Twitter,

> The "Mozilla ads" inside Firefox is actually taking us from
> http://cl.ly/image/033X3C3R1m3f to http://cl.ly/image/3I172o2f202k
> for first run

https://twitter.com/clarkbw/status/433333066514198528

To the best of my knowledge, there are no plans on using any kind of
user data for deciding what ends up on the empty tiles. As the blogpost
noted,

> "Some of these tile placements will be from the Mozilla ecosystem,
> some will be popular websites in a given geographic location, and
> some will be sponsored content from hand-picked partners to help
> support Mozilla’s pursuit of our mission"

which I would assume to be based on the Firefox locale, just like the
existing facilities for search providers in the search box.

I would also hope that we trust the other people in Mozilla to have the
user's interests at heart. That includes the people who decide what kind
of image/text is shown in the tile, and what tiles we would consider
shipping and what tiles we would not.

If you do not trust the people making these decisions, I would argue
that is a separate problem (to be taken up in .governance) to having the
ability to prepopulate these tiles.

We already prepopulate:
- bookmarks
- search providers
- links to Firefox/Mozilla support/help/information sites

We monetize some of what is in the search provider list (but not
everything).

I don't understand why implementing the ability to prepopulate the
tiles, and monetizing some (but not all) of them, has some people
commenting here so much more worried than the current state of affairs,
and why this would get us onto a slippery slope that we were not on before.

Note also that you can remove sites from your tiles, just like you can
remove (sponsored or otherwise) search providers. I would expect us to
continue providing that possibility.

~ Gijs

[Majken Connor]

Without having an opinion on any of the other aspects, Mozilla does need to
do a much better job at supporting like-minded organizations. So having
tiles that do that in itself seems like a good idea.

The rest of it I agree I would remain wary until knowing more details.
Would we approach these companies and solicit them? "We like you, if you
give us money we'll promote you..." just doesn't have a nice sound to it.

I think the big problem is that things get announced and the process of how
we got there isn't transparent. I'm sure people have thought of these
things, it would be nice to have anticipated concerns addressed up front.

> _______________________________________________
> governance mailing list
> gover...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
>

[Fjoerfoks]

Lots of negative responses indeed, in The Netherlands too, like "Exit
Firefox due to new ads", etc.
Although the explanation is clear and
http://tweakers.net/nieuws/94263/mozilla-gaat-firefox-van-advertenties-voorzien.html
is being objective.

When I first saw the headlines dropping by, it even made me shiver, guess
this has not been marketed well.
Mozilla needs to be carefull the next days and try to be clear about htis.

[Tim Taubert]

Gijs Kruitbosch wrote:
> On 12/02/2014 07:42, Jim Porter wrote:
>> On 02/11/2014 07:26 PM, Zack Weinberg wrote:
>> I obviously wasn't involved in any internal discussion with "Directory
>> Tiles", but I'm hoping that this is something that was already fairly
>> well-known amongst Firefox Desktop devs.
>
> It was presented and discussed at the Firefox desktop work week in
> Paris, early January. There were many other ideas that were shot down
> well before they were even shown to the Fx desktop team.

All of the people in and surrounding the Firefox Desktop team knew that
this would be coming. We talked a lot about it and the internal
communication was great, I think.

Yesterday's external communication however brings a slightly uneasy
feeling after reading the blog post [1]. I did not feel like this was
targeted to the people who will (or rather might) be affected by the
changes.

It would have been better to describe what we will be doing, why we will
be doing it, and more importantly *how* we are going to do it. There are
a few lines in the post trying to address this but we should have put
more emphasis there because Mozilla is about trust, and also because we
could have expected the news coverage to turn out like it did. This
tweet quite accurately describes my gut reaction and how others might
perceive it:

https://twitter.com/zeigor/status/433557177220206592

I fully support the plan and think it is important but I wish we had
chosen a clearer way to communicate this.


[1]
https://blog.mozilla.org/advancingcontent/2014/02/11/publisher-transformation-with-users-at-the-center/


- Tim

[Gijs Kruitbosch]

On 12/02/2014 10:11, Gijs Kruitbosch wrote:
>
> As Bryan Clark put it on Twitter,
>
> > The "Mozilla ads" inside Firefox is actually taking us from
> > http://cl.ly/image/033X3C3R1m3f to http://cl.ly/image/3I172o2f202k
> > for first run
>
> https://twitter.com/clarkbw/status/433333066514198528

It was pointed out to me that these links (images) don't have a clear
text alternative. My apologies. A description follows:

The first image shows the about:newtab page as it currently looks for
new users: with 9 tiles, 8 of which are blank. The only other one
contains the first-run page (that is, the "Welcome to Firefox" page).

The second image shows a mockup of the feature, which has all 9 tiles
populated. The text labels for the tiles are:

"Firefox"
"Mozilla Foundation"
"Firefox OS"
"Electronic Frontier Foundation"
"Amazon"
"Facebook"
"Wikipedia"
"Twitter"
"Yahoo!"

The images shown in the tiles are the logos of the respective entities.

The tiles for Amazon, Facebook and Yahoo! have a small orange icon with
an arrow pointing to the top right; I'm not sure if this is an artifact
of the mockup or meant to indicate they are sponsored. Irrespective of
that, from what we heard in the work week, I am 99.99% certain the
mockup isn't at all final.

Gijs

[Sheeri Cabral]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Benjamin Kerensa" <bker...@gmail.com>
Cc: mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
Sent: Wednesday, February 12, 2014 3:29:11 AM
Subject: Re: sponsored new tab tiles - please tell me this is a (bad) joke

I have to say right now on Google+ and on other Social Media networks there
are lots of people not taking the announcement well. I would say this is
impacting at least a minority of our users feelings about Firefox.

-----------

Of course there are lots of people unhappy about this announcement - any time an open source company tries to make money, people are unhappy. There are also a lot of people unhappy that a large percentage of our revenue comes from Google. There are many people who are unhappy because they think that Google controls us.

I'll say it again - any time an open source company tries to make money, people are unhappy. By diversifying our income, we can better serve everyone. If we do not have money, we have to tighten up what we do. Lots of people are still unhappy about us putting Thunderbird and Seamonkey on the back burner, but we do not have unlimited funds to pay engineers and infrastructure staff to develop every product we have ever come up with - even the successful one.

I wasn't part of coming up with sponsored tiles, but I'm surprised at how very little trust everyone has in the people who did. Do you really think that the concerns that popped into your head within 24 hours of hearing this announced did not occur to the committee of people who brainstormed this idea for *weeks* (if not months)?

We're all smart and have unique ideas, but OMG SPONSORED CONTENT! DON'T INVADE PRIVACY! is not unique, and it was stated that the new feature will hold Mozilla's values, which include a commitment to privacy.

And really, people complaining about the new feature is probably better than people complaining about why we have it. The last thing I want to see is headlines like OMG MOZILLA HAS NO MONEY! or OMG GOOGLE IS TRYING TO CONTROL MOZILLA WITH MONEY SO THEY ARE DESPERATELY TRYING TO BREAK FREE!

Do we have the *potential* to break trust? Absolutely! But we've had that potential for 15 years and we have a damn good reputation for it, with Firefox on the Desktop, on Android, and now with Firefox OS. What I'm not proud of is so many smart colleagues who just assume that an issue as big as this was not thought through backwards and forwards, just because there are potential problems.

-Sheeri

(PS This response was to Ben, but it applies to everyone thinking this way. It's bullshit and I'm really tired of it, and I'll own my own sensitivity to this kind of issue - I've been dealing with 5 years of OMG THE SKY IS FALLING AND ORACLE IS GOING TO KILL MYSQL....even though Oracle has had ownership of a major component of MySQL - InnoDB - since 2005. Oracle has a reputation of not killing MySQL for 9 years now, and yet, people are still saying Oracle will kill it. I don't love Oracle, but there's no base in the idea that they'll kill MySQL.)

[Alina Mierlus]

Hi all,

I mostly subscribe to what Pascal said. If this implementation doesn't
affect user's privacy and there is a dialogue with the user about her
preferences (looks like the UP service does this) then it's a good way to
diversify revenue.

Think that Mozilla's revenue until now was coming from the ads industry as
well, but more indirectly (communicated as "partnership with search
providers").

The problem here is the communication, as always. The blog post lacks some
essence and looks very commercial (for a tech. non-profit, mission oriented
org). I believe there are some ethics / a vision and an economic approach
to Mozilla Services. Hoping that soon, some of the "leaders" of the project
will start a public conversation about this...it would probably avoid
frustration and confusion in the future.

My 2 cents,
Alina

[Michael Kelly]

I don't assume this wasn't thought through (after an initial period of
"What?! Ads on newtab? Whaargrbl!", but that speaks to my lack of
vocabulary more than anything), but I am bothered by the fact that I
can't find any more info about this outside of the blog post. Thus, I'm
in the position that a) A feature that, at first glance, sounds
contrary to Mozilla's values, has been announced, and b) The only
official info on this feature is a tweet from an employee and a
badly-worded blog post.

I mean, the feature is called Directory Tiles, right? First, I went to
the Mozilla Wiki and searched for the phrase, came up with nothing.
Next, I did an internet search and pulled up a bunch of news posts
about it echoing the blog post. Then, I went to the firefox-dev list
(based on the mention earlier that Firefox devs knew about this) and
searched through thread titles for the past few months, found nothing.

Frustrated, I decided to see if the team had a page anywhere outside of
this blog. Wiki + Internet Search for Mozilla Content Services turns up
nothing but more posts about this particular feature, and some profiles
of Darren Herman. As a Mozillian, this is the point I'd ask who is on
that team and then message them directly. As a non-Mozillian? I'm stuck!

I would've expected a wiki page, maybe some meeting notes, or at least
an email or two to a public list. I can understand arguments about
controversial features being developed internally until we announce it,
but I think it's fair to have more questions and doubt about those
features than ones developed out in the open.

Trust is what's keeping us (Mozillians, not users/the public) from
saying "Mozilla is selling off users, end times are nigh, repent!", but
it won't keep us from asking hard questions.

(PS: If the details about this feature are available somewhere and I
failed to find it, yay! A link would be greatly appreciated! Then we
just have a discoverability problem.)

- Mike Kelly

[Ken Saunders]

I personally (as a user and Mozillian), have no problems with this being done because I understand the need and I know and trust Mozilla. The problem is, the greater majority of users and the public in general do not.

Clearing up internal concerns about why more people aren't aware of this, the transparency process and so on are valid, but the greatest immediate need right now (in my opinion of course), is providing us (or is it we) Mozillians with some precise details so that we can accurately and with confidence, respond to the concerns of users, diffuse the hype, and if need be, defend this.

Ken Saunders

[Sheeri Cabral]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Kelly" <mke...@mozilla.com>
To: "Sheeri Cabral" <sca...@mozilla.com>
Cc: mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org, "Benjamin Kerensa" <bker...@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, February 12, 2014 9:08:09 AM
Subject: Re: sponsored new tab tiles - please tell me this is a (bad) joke

I don't assume this wasn't thought through (after an initial period of
"What?! Ads on newtab? Whaargrbl!", but that speaks to my lack of
vocabulary more than anything), but I am bothered by the fact that I
can't find any more info about this outside of the blog post. Thus, I'm
in the position that a) A feature that, at first glance, sounds
contrary to Mozilla's values, has been announced, and b) The only
official info on this feature is a tweet from an employee and a
badly-worded blog post.

------------------

And if you read the blog post, you'd see that it's only for the "new tab" page, and only for people who don't have a browsing history (so, new people and people who don't save history or clear it often).

Here's a thought experiment - without looking, what's on your new tab page? Do you even know? (I only knew 2 of the tiles from actual remembering, I don't know if most people know more or fewer than that)

It's unobtrusive, doesn't degrade any actual web page, and goes away once some history builds up.

Selling ads is not contrary to Mozilla's values, any more than selling t-shirts is contrary to Mozilla's values...think about what you are concerned about, what is *actually* contrary to Mozilla's values, and really ask yourself if you believe that Mozilla selling ads would do that. Would Mozilla invade privacy to sell ads? Would Mozilla money to do its mission, by directly opposing the mission? After 15 years of arguing for the rights and privacy of the user, is there not *any* trust?

What if the ads were for organizations like the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) and the Knight Foundation, or for projects like Webmaker, or for a Firefox OS Phone from Telefonica? I can think of TONS of ads that would *promote* Mozilla's mission in addition to being a source of revenue*. Maybe we can all use the energy around this discussion to come up with lots of great mission-promoting ads, instead of making slippery slope arguments.

-Sheeri

* and yes, I can also think of tons of ads that would promote companies directly against Mozilla's values, offend people, be unsightly, etc. but I also know that Mozillians are smart and want to do the right thing.

Mozilla controls a web browser, and I can think of a ton of features we could program that would violate privacy - for one, let's intercept and keep a copy of every file uploaded through the browser! Just because we have a web browser and *could potentially* program that in, that does not mean we should be all up in arms about what we *could* do. Ads *could* do bad things, but I'm not immediately jumping to the conclusion that Mozilla's ads *will*.

[Majken Connor]

Sheeri,

I understand and agree with your point of view, but I think you're only
looking at the trust equation going in one direction. I could list examples
of things that have happened in Mozilla that have eroded my trust. People
who go way back have been willing to compromise some values for the greater
good. Announcements that haven't been handled in the most Mozillian of ways.

Just like your reaction is coloured by your other experiences, you need to
remember that ours are as well.

I feel much better about the culture and leadership of Mozilla lately, but
there are still things that make me uneasy sometimes. Values will also
always be shades of grey. For many contributors Mozilla got way too
corporate years ago. In their case the trust has already been broken.

Ken makes a very good point, we need to move the conversation forward, and
mobilize the community to help counter the poor initial reaction.

[Benjamin Kerensa]

Sheeri,

Thanks for your response I know that many Mozillians trust Mozilla like I
do but my concern is that there are millions of users and potential users
who might hear about this and not have all the facts and find a conclusion
similar to the media.

When a site like Consumerist is critical of an organization I usually trust
it since they do consumer advocacy. So my thought is that others seeing
that might have some fear or concerns as a result.

I just think more info should have been provided in the first post and if
it couldn't be the post should have waited until a more informative post
could have been provided.

In talking with fellow Mozillians many of us were blindsided by the
negative response on Social Media and have had to do our best to respond
something that we do not fully understand. As others have pointed out there
was not public discussion or info other than the blog post to be found on
this new feature and I think that's what is fueling FUD.

--
Benjamin Kerensa
http://benjaminkerensa.com


This message may contain information which is privileged or confidential.
If you are not the named addressee of this message please destroy it
without reading, using, copying or disclosing its contents to any other
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[Johnathan Nightingale]

On Feb 12, 2014, at 9:40 AM, Ken Saunders wrote:

> I personally (as a user and Mozillian), have no problems with this being done because I understand the need and I know and trust Mozilla. The problem is, the greater majority of users and the public in general do not.
>
> Clearing up internal concerns about why more people aren't aware of this, the transparency process and so on are valid, but the greatest immediate need right now (in my opinion of course), is providing us (or is it we) Mozillians with some precise details so that we can accurately and with confidence, respond to the concerns of users, diffuse the hype, and if need be, defend this.

I was going to start my reply with something like "Let's all pause for a second, here and take a breath" but as I re-read the thread, almost everyone is already doing that and the discussion has been really thoughtful and measured. Thank you all for that. Headline writers get paid to inflame, it's nice to know that we have an ample supply of anti-inflammatories.

Headlines aside, let's get really specific. The thing we're talking about today is the experience of a new Firefox user with an empty profile. We give them a new tab page with a bunch of blank tiles. That's a crappy first experience and we should make it better. Darren's team looked at that, and realized that we could make this better for users and generate income for Mozilla if we were smart about it. Pre-populating those tiles, like we already pre-populate search providers, is just a better experience. As with search, we should make the choices that make the most sense for our users, we should make them localizable even if we have certain global defaults, and we should give users choice over whether to use them at all. Of course the implementation has to be done in ways that respect our users and serve our values as a project. I think that is all self-evident to people who read these groups, but I know that surprise and confusion is an uncomfortable place, and makes it harder to reason from trust.

Like any other feature, this will land in m-c, be scrutinized, have bugs, fix bugs, get tested in pre-release, get redesigned, &c. Just like with search, we'll need to figure out which entries make sense, which ones are commercial and should have a revenue sharing piece, and which ones are non-commercial (like our inclusion of wikipedia search) and how we manage that list. This is early days, so if there aren't answers to some of those things yet, it's mostly because we're figuring them out together, not because they're devious answers that we haven't figured out how to "message". Again, I think this is self-evident to most people on the list, but reminders help.

J


PS - Cross posting since the thread is in both places. Contrary to Pascal, I think this does belong in dev.planning so I'd recommend follow ups go there. I hear Pascal's argument that this goes to values, but our values impact our products and development across the board. Values should be part of every discussion, not just the remit of governance, imo.

---
Johnathan Nightingale
VP Firefox
@johnath

[Sheeri Cabral]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Benjamin Kerensa" <bker...@gmail.com>
To: "Majken Connor" <maj...@gmail.com>
Cc: "Sheeri Cabral" <sca...@mozilla.com>, "Michael Kelly" <mke...@mozilla.com>, mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
Sent: Wednesday, February 12, 2014 10:25:21 AM
Subject: Re: sponsored new tab tiles - please tell me this is a (bad) joke

In talking with fellow Mozillians many of us were blindsided by the negative response on Social Media and have had to do our best to respond something that we do not fully understand. As others have pointed out there was not public discussion or info other than the blog post to be found on this new feature and I think that's what is fueling FUD.

-------

Ben - I agree it's frustrating to be blindsided. What happened here was a failure of some of our leadership. If the news did not get to you before the public announcement, ask your team leader if s/he knew before the public announcement. Keep going up the chain until you find the break, and explain that this is a scenario where transparency coming down from the top could have avoided problems. Hold your leaders accountable.

Some might say that we need to be more open and transparent, and hierarchies like that are Not The Mozilla Way. In my opinion, sending an e-mail to all Mozillians, or announcing it in a company-wide meeting, or posting it publicly first, is not a good way to handle it. People have freakouts in much larger groups, not everyone can have their concerns heard, FUD is spread, etc.

*Full disclosure*: this is what worked for me, that doesn't mean it will work for everyone, but I honestly believe it would be better than what happened, or an e-mail to everyone from the top. All the IT managers got a preview of the company goals, including this one, from our VP, and I can only speak for myself as an IT manager, but I told the people who work for me. Why was I told, when you weren't? I can't answer that, and I don't think it's fair to you, and I think you should hold your leaders accountable for why you weren't given a preview, as I was.

As for the points people said about a decision being made without input: I don't see this as a final decision that was made (my personal opinion). I see it as a bunch of people got into a room and brainstormed, and they came up with a few ideas for diversifying revenue. One of those ideas is controversial and people are upset about that; I don't see anyone complaining that there was no public discussion about other 3 ideas - the "Voices" program, for example. It's very possible that some or all 4 of these revenue-diversifying ideas won't work, in which case they'll try other ideas.

There is an accountable person for the "Invest in Sustainability" Mozilla company goal (https://intranet.mozilla.org/2014Goals - not sure if all Mozillians can see this or not). If you have great ideas for revenue generation, I'm sure they'd be welcome by that person.

-Sheeri

[Reuben Morais]

On Feb 12, 2014, at 14:04, Sheeri Cabral <sca...@mozilla.com> wrote:
> Some might say that we need to be more open and transparent, and hierarchies like that are Not The Mozilla Way. In my opinion, sending an e-mail to all Mozillians, or announcing it in a company-wide meeting, or posting it publicly first, is not a good way to handle it. People have freakouts in much larger groups, not everyone can have their concerns heard, FUD is spread, etc.

This thread was started by a community member. And then Michael Kelly showed how he went looking for explanations like he usually does for Mozilla stuff and found nothing (and he's @mozilla.com!). This is about Mozillians in general not knowing what this new announced thing is about, how it works, how it aligns to the mission, etc.

> There is an accountable person for the "Invest in Sustainability" Mozilla company goal (https://intranet.mozilla.org/2014Goals - not sure if all Mozillians can see this or not).

Intranet is behind MoCo (and MoFo?) LDAP, so only a small fraction of Mozillians can see it.

-- reuben

[Mike Connor]

Hi Reuben,

The 2014 goals have also been posted to the Mozillians Yammer [1], and
were discussed at the Town Hall [2] (which was also open to Mozillians)
yesterday. The firehose at Mozilla has always been hard to keep up with,
but for those who want to keep up there we're trying to keep the community
informed through these channels. I'd encourage anyone wanting to stay in
the loop to follow these communication channels.

-- Mike

[1] https://www.yammer.com/mozillians/#/Threads/show?threadId=364852417
[2] https://air.mozilla.org/town-hall-2014-goals/

-----Original Message-----
From: governance
[mailto:governance-bounces+mconnor=mozil...@lists.mozilla.org] On
Behalf Of Reuben Morais
Sent: February 12, 2014 11:19 AM
To: Sheeri Cabral
Cc: Michael Kelly; Majken Connor; Benjamin Kerensa;
mozilla-g...@lists.mozilla.org
Subject: Re: sponsored new tab tiles - please tell me this is a (bad) joke

[Reuben Morais]

On Feb 12, 2014, at 14:44, Mike Connor <mco...@mozilla.com> wrote:
> Hi Reuben,
>
> The 2014 goals have also been posted to the Mozillians Yammer [1], and
> were discussed at the Town Hall [2] (which was also open to Mozillians)
> yesterday. The firehose at Mozilla has always been hard to keep up with,
> but for those who want to keep up there we're trying to keep the community
> informed through these channels. I'd encourage anyone wanting to stay in
> the loop to follow these communication channels.

That's really good to know! (Maybe we should move the 2014Goals article from the Intranet to the Wiki?)
The first point still stands though, community members don't have managers to escalate their questions to.

-- reuben

[David Flanagan]

On 2/12/14 4:13 AM, Tim Taubert wrote:
> All of the people in and surrounding the Firefox Desktop team knew that
> this would be coming. We talked a lot about it and the internal
> communication was great, I think.
>
> Yesterday's external communication however brings a slightly uneasy
> feeling after reading the blog post [1]. I did not feel like this was
> targeted to the people who will (or rather might) be affected by the
> changes.

Wow. You're completely right: this announcement is a total turnoff.
Mostly this is because Darren's audience is not Firefox users, but "
content creators whether they are publishers or marketers." And if
he's writing for publishers and marketers, of course his post is going
to be full of the kind of jargon that makes engineers cringe. For the
vast majority of Mozillians and Firefox users, Darren's blog post will
read like BS.

It seems like a real mistake that this was not announced in a post that
was actually addressed to users and contributors before Darren's post
for publishers and marketers went live.

David

[Gareth Aye]

Yeah seriously...

> When the user is at the center everyone benefits, including content

creators whether they are publishers or marketers.

Excuse me while I vomit :(

[Alina Mierlus]

I see your points Sheeri. I also understand the UP service (as I was
part of a brainstorming group during Summit). As I mentioned in my
previous comment, I really like the idea of reforming the way users
interact with ads (as long as the privacy is taken into account).

You also mention Voices. Unfortunately, I heard about this seeing a Job
description ( http://careers.mozilla.org/es/position/oEtmYfwb ) - which
uses a very poor language (even violent - to a certain point).

Now, you are redirecting me to an Intranet document (I don't have
access, as I'm not a staff). I don't want to know about internal
negotiations or sensitive topics, but as a person belonging to the
community, as a steward of Mozilla technology, I'd much enjoy
conversations in the open.

Could the "Invest in Sustainability leader" spark an interesting/thought
provoking conversation on a blog? Could other leaders present Mozilla's
2014 Goals in the open (without needing to be more Mozillian than other
Mozillians in order to have access to "secret documents")?

Again, the main problem is about communication. I miss the time when
yearly goals were discussed on blogs:
https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2008/09/11/proposed-2010-goals/ . It's
probably what got me into Mozilla.

-Alina

>
> There is an accountable person for the "Invest in Sustainability"
> Mozilla company goal (https://intranet.mozilla.org/2014Goals - not

> sure if all Mozillians can see this or not). If you have great ideas
> for revenue generation, I'm sure they'd be welcome by that person.
>
> -Sheeri

[Chris Peterson]

On 2/12/14, 9:23 AM, David Flanagan wrote:
> Wow. You're completely right: this announcement is a total turnoff.
> Mostly this is because Darren's audience is not Firefox users, but "
> content creators whether they are publishers or marketers." And if
> he's writing for publishers and marketers, of course his post is going
> to be full of the kind of jargon that makes engineers cringe. For the
> vast majority of Mozillians and Firefox users, Darren's blog post will
> read like BS.

Announcing Firefox's "not ads" at the Interactive Advertising Bureau's
annual meeting gives a strong impression that these are, in fact, ads
and will bring all the baggage of traditional web advertising.

I wished the blog post emphasized at the top of the post that this plan
will (for now?) only affect new user profiles until they have built more
browsing history. That information and the empty tab screenshot are
buried "below the fold" on my screen. A revised screenshot with example
tiles is floating around the internet, but it should have been included
with the announcement post to temper reader's wild speculation of what
the sponsored tiles will look like.


chris

[Fred Wenzel]

Glyn Moody, a long-time friend of Mozilla in the press, expresses the
Mozilla community's worries very well, go give it a read:

<http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2014/02/is-mozilla-selling-out/index.htm>

Quote:
> This is not how Mozilla should be talking to its huge and loyal community, which includes people who have been with it since the early days, and who do not expect to be treated like dumb consumers that must be bamboozled with high-sounding but hackneyed phrases. If Mozilla wants to find new ways to earn money from its projects because it is worried about its dependence on one company, just say so. We're grown-ups: we can take it. But don't sell out to the world of marketing and lose all those other things that make Mozilla special.

~F

On 2/12/14 4:13 AM, Tim Taubert wrote:

> Gijs Kruitbosch wrote:
>> On 12/02/2014 07:42, Jim Porter wrote:
>>> On 02/11/2014 07:26 PM, Zack Weinberg wrote:
>>> I obviously wasn't involved in any internal discussion with "Directory
>>> Tiles", but I'm hoping that this is something that was already fairly
>>> well-known amongst Firefox Desktop devs.
>>
>> It was presented and discussed at the Firefox desktop work week in
>> Paris, early January. There were many other ideas that were shot down
>> well before they were even shown to the Fx desktop team.
>

> All of the people in and surrounding the Firefox Desktop team knew that
> this would be coming. We talked a lot about it and the internal
> communication was great, I think.
>
> Yesterday's external communication however brings a slightly uneasy
> feeling after reading the blog post [1]. I did not feel like this was
> targeted to the people who will (or rather might) be affected by the
> changes.
>

> It would have been better to describe what we will be doing, why we will
> be doing it, and more importantly *how* we are going to do it. There are
> a few lines in the post trying to address this but we should have put
> more emphasis there because Mozilla is about trust, and also because we
> could have expected the news coverage to turn out like it did. This
> tweet quite accurately describes my gut reaction and how others might
> perceive it:
>
> https://twitter.com/zeigor/status/433557177220206592
>
> I fully support the plan and think it is important but I wish we had
> chosen a clearer way to communicate this.
>
>
> [1]
> https://blog.mozilla.org/advancingcontent/2014/02/11/publisher-transformation-with-users-at-the-center/
>
>
> - Tim

[Daniel Glazman]

On 12/02/14 22:15, Fred Wenzel wrote:

> Glyn Moody, a long-time friend of Mozilla in the press, expresses the
> Mozilla community's worries very well, go give it a read:
>
> <http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2014/02/is-mozilla-selling-out/index.htm>

Let me add just one thing: it's very surprising - I could say
shocking - to see the community that made emerge and brought AdBlock+
to the masses now serve ads.

</Daniel>

[Fred Wenzel]

I would be careful with the phrasing. Calling these new tab tiles "ads"
is misleading as it invokes mental images of popups and flashing
Times-Square-style billboards.

In the case of the sensationalistic tech press, this misinterpretation
is quite intentional.

I don't think we're advancing the discussion if we fall prey to that.

~F

[Nicholas Nethercote]

On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 10:42 AM, Chris Peterson <cpet...@mozilla.com> wrote:
>
> Announcing Firefox's "not ads" at the Interactive Advertising Bureau's
> annual meeting gives a strong impression that these are, in fact, ads and
> will bring all the baggage of traditional web advertising.

This this this. A thousand times this. The "optics" (in the political
sense) of this announcement is about as un-Mozilla as I can imagine.

Selling ads in the browser -- even the most tasteful, minimal,
reasonable, relevant, privacy-respecting ads imaginable -- is crossing
a major threshold. It'll forever make Firefox "the browser with ads".
And it leads directly into Zack's slippery slope concerns, for which I
have a lot of sympathy.

Nick

[Robert Accettura]

Your brain connected the dots the same way mine did.

[Reuben Morais]

Not that this changes my opinion on the matter, but it won't make us /the/ browser with ads, it'll make us /a/ browser with ads. Both Safari and Opera have done this for a very long time now.

-- reuben

[Benjamin Kerensa]

Reuben,

It would make us the browser with ads because no offense to Opera or Apple
but their browsers are but small fish in the browser ocean. That is why
this has attracted so much attention is because Firefox is a player and is
relevant.

If Chrome or IE landed a similar feature I'm sure they would get the same
coverage.

> _______________________________________________
> governance mailing list
> gover...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
>

[Zack Weinberg]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

On 02/12/2014 11:44 AM, Mike Connor wrote:
> Hi Reuben,
>
> The 2014 goals have also been posted to the Mozillians Yammer [1],
> and were discussed at the Town Hall [2] (which was also open to
> Mozillians) yesterday. The firehose at Mozilla has always been
> hard to keep up with, but for those who want to keep up there we're
> trying to keep the community informed through these channels. I'd
> encourage anyone wanting to stay in the loop to follow these
> communication channels.

I've said this elsethread but let me say it again here: a feature with
this level of user privacy implications should have been discussed on
the -privacy mailing list, and ideally -security as well, prior to any
announcement.

My personal ability to keep up with the firehose extends only to
selected mailing lists, bugmail, and Planet. Yammer is one thing too
many.

zw
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[Daniel Glazman]

On 12/02/14 23:21, Fred Wenzel wrote:

> I would be careful with the phrasing. Calling these new tab tiles "ads"
> is misleading as it invokes mental images of popups and flashing
> Times-Square-style billboards.
>
> In the case of the sensationalistic tech press, this misinterpretation
> is quite intentional.
>
> I don't think we're advancing the discussion if we fall prey to that.

Oh please, can we avoid here the corporate blah-blah? The Mozilla
community at large is complaining in public and perceives these tiles
as ads. Even Mozilla employees complain in public, about ads and
something else being a "proprietary product". Call them "sponsored
blurbs" if you want, when a company pays another one for increased
visibility to users, it's in general and across all industries called
advertisement. Like it or not.

So the press is perfectly right about it. And complaining about
the press is too easy; don't want the press to hit you? Don't be
hittable by them.

The fact you don't seem to see it is a serious concern to me. Is
Mozilla Corp. so disconnected from the perception its community
currently has?

</Daniel>

[Fred Wenzel]

Daniel, you're intentionally reading my comment out of context:

You mentioned Adblock+ whose primary purpose it is to get rid of "Times
Square"-style ads. Treating these tiles the same way is what I
cautioned against.

You argue (now) that you don't see a difference. Which is fine. I don't
agree, but it's fine.

Throwing me into a vague "corporate blah-blah" bucket however is
uncalled for, nor claiming I am not part of the Mozilla community.

Fred

[Daniel Glazman]

On 13/02/14 07:10, Fred Wenzel wrote:

> Throwing me into a vague "corporate blah-blah" bucket however is
> uncalled for, nor claiming I am not part of the Mozilla community.

Fred, I never said you're not a part of it, how can you imagine
I can think that? "sponsored tiles" are almost universally perceived
as ads, and perception is what matters most; that's all what I'm
saying. Apologies if you took it as a personal attack, it was not
one at all.

</Daniel>

[tofumatt]

[CITATION NEEDED]

Also, you can't apologize by saying "sorry you took what I said as an attack". You're either sorry you said something wrong or you're not; don't apologize for someone mistaking what you said. That's so disingenuous.

[Nikos Roussos]

On Wed, 2014-02-12 at 22:10 -0800, Fred Wenzel wrote:
> Daniel, you're intentionally reading my comment out of context:
>
> You mentioned Adblock+ whose primary purpose it is to get rid of "Times
> Square"-style ads. Treating these tiles the same way is what I
> cautioned against.

Is it? I mean, I would consider a nice feature of Adblock Edge if it
blocks the tiles that promote (thus advertise) for-profit companies.

I understand that's some times is hard to keep balance, but please don't
justify this over bad UX for first time users that open a new tab. This
is solved easily by promoting non-profit similar minded organizations
(EFF, Wikimedia, CC, etc). If we want to defend this let's at least be
honest on why we are doing this.

~nikos

[Nikos Roussos]

On Wed, 2014-02-12 at 13:15 -0800, Fred Wenzel wrote:
> Glyn Moody, a long-time friend of Mozilla in the press, expresses the
> Mozilla community's worries very well, go give it a read:
>
> <http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2014/02/is-mozilla-selling-out/index.htm>

It seems we are loosing some long-time allies over this. Appelbaum made
a similar comment on twitter
https://twitter.com/ioerror/status/433703362173747200

Some linux distributions (at least at Fedora where I'm contributing),
who deliver firefox for their users, already discussing about removing
this feature during the build process.

~nikos

[Daniel Glazman]

On 13/02/14 07:44, tofumatt wrote:

> Also, you can't apologize by saying "sorry you took what I said as an attack". You're either sorry you said something wrong or you're not; don't apologize for someone mistaking what you said. That's so disingenuous.

Fred - who I highly respect - and I discussed this privately and he
accepted my apologies saying "no hard feelings". So....

</Daniel>

[Majken Connor]

I added some questions for the town hall to the moderator, but I have a
thought that is not a question and won't fit into 140 char anyway.

I think the reason this crosses the line into advertisement is that it
seems like we're doing something the user isn't asking for. Search is nice
and out of the way until you need it, and we know it's a service users want
that we have chosen not to provide ourselves. We also know we are driving
business to these providers and we charge accordingly.

In this case, the rationale doesn't seem to be "users don't know where to
go" and this is a solution to a problem users are having. It's possible
that we have data that shows this is the case, but the talk has been "but
it looks bad empty!"

Something else to keep in mind, having Google be our default homepage has
helped contribute to the problem that users think they have to go through
Google to get places. This tiles feature could actually help solve *that*
problem, and it would be giving users a choice compared to the default home
page experience.

This sounds similar to the feature we heard about in the Firefox in China
thread, it seems interesting.

No one has said it yet, but wasn't advertising in Netscape part of the
death of that product? I wouldn't be surprised if that is in the back of
other people's minds as well. It doesn't mean that we're making the same
mistake, and I know we're not talking about out and out advertising, but
the similarities that do exist are what's making people nervous.

On Thu, Feb 13, 2014 at 9:25 AM, Daniel Glazman <dan...@glazman.org> wrote:

> On 13/02/14 07:44, tofumatt wrote:
>

> > Also, you can't apologize by saying "sorry you took what I said as an
> attack". You're either sorry you said something wrong or you're not; don't
> apologize for someone mistaking what you said. That's so disingenuous.
>

> Fred - who I highly respect - and I discussed this privately and he
> accepted my apologies saying "no hard feelings". So....
>
> </Daniel>

[Dirkjan Ochtman]

On Thu, Feb 13, 2014 at 11:55 AM, Majken Connor <maj...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I added some questions for the town hall to the moderator, but I have a
> thought that is not a question and won't fit into 140 char anyway.

Mitchell addressed a bunch of these posts in a blog post:

https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2014/02/13/content-ads-caution/

Cheers,

Dirkjan

[Patrick Finch]

On 2/13/2014 1:04 AM, Benjamin Kerensa wrote:
> Reuben,
>
> It would make us the browser with ads because no offense to Opera or Apple
> but their browsers are but small fish in the browser ocean. That is why
> this has attracted so much attention is because Firefox is a player and is
> relevant.
>
> If Chrome or IE landed a similar feature I'm sure they would get the same
> coverage.

I think that's moot.

IE introduced a Suggested Sites (a similar feature, I'd suggest) in 2008
(!) and it remains in IE 11. See
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/internet-explorer/get-browsing-suggestions#ie=ie-8


For Chrome, it's a rather different case. I find it harder and harder
to distinguish between Chrome and Google's services. I think it's
reasonable to say that the former exists to push the user to the latter,
which of course monetise through advertising.

Patrick

> On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 3:07 PM, Reuben Morais <reuben...@gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> On Feb 12, 2014, at 20:51, Nicholas Nethercote <n.neth...@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>> On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 10:42 AM, Chris Peterson <cpet...@mozilla.com>
>> wrote:
>>>> Announcing Firefox's "not ads" at the Interactive Advertising Bureau's
>>>> annual meeting gives a strong impression that these are, in fact, ads
>> and
>>>> will bring all the baggage of traditional web advertising.
>>> This this this. A thousand times this. The "optics" (in the political
>>> sense) of this announcement is about as un-Mozilla as I can imagine.
>>>
>>> Selling ads in the browser -- even the most tasteful, minimal,
>>> reasonable, relevant, privacy-respecting ads imaginable -- is crossing
>>> a major threshold. It'll forever make Firefox "the browser with ads".
>>> And it leads directly into Zack's slippery slope concerns, for which I
>>> have a lot of sympathy.
>> Not that this changes my opinion on the matter, but it won't make us /the/
>> browser with ads, it'll make us /a/ browser with ads. Both Safari and Opera
>> have done this for a very long time now.
>>
>> -- reuben

>> _______________________________________________
>> governance mailing list
>> gover...@lists.mozilla.org
>> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
>>
>
>

--
Patrick Finch
Mobile: +46 768 444 833
IM: patric...@gmail.com

[David Rajchenbach-Teller]

On 2/13/14 1:29 AM, Zack Weinberg wrote:
> I've said this elsethread but let me say it again here: a feature with
> this level of user privacy implications should have been discussed on
> the -privacy mailing list, and ideally -security as well, prior to any
> announcement.

Well, only if it has any privacy or security implications. In terms of
privacy and security, the feature that was discussed is equivalent to
adding a few handpicked bookmarks in the bookmark menu.

> My personal ability to keep up with the firehose extends only to
> selected mailing lists, bugmail, and Planet. Yammer is one thing too
> many.

Side-note: Same issue here.

Cheers,
David

--
David Rajchenbach-Teller, PhD
Performance Team, Mozilla

[David Rajchenbach-Teller]

So let's be clear: the main objective is financial independence, but all
the ideas that did not also improve user experience were shot down.

Cheers,
David

On 2/13/14 9:17 AM, Nikos Roussos wrote:
> I understand that's some times is hard to keep balance, but please don't
> justify this over bad UX for first time users that open a new tab. This
> is solved easily by promoting non-profit similar minded organizations
> (EFF, Wikimedia, CC, etc). If we want to defend this let's at least be
> honest on why we are doing this.

[Nikos Roussos]

On Fri, 2014-02-14 at 11:49 +0100, David Rajchenbach-Teller wrote:
> On 2/13/14 1:29 AM, Zack Weinberg wrote:
> > I've said this elsethread but let me say it again here: a feature with
> > this level of user privacy implications should have been discussed on
> > the -privacy mailing list, and ideally -security as well, prior to any
> > announcement.
>
> Well, only if it has any privacy or security implications. In terms of
> privacy and security, the feature that was discussed is equivalent to
> adding a few handpicked bookmarks in the bookmark menu.

So these handpicked bookmarks will be bundled with Firefox? The only
privacy concern I see here is whether or not Firefox will pull some
images/logos and urls from somewhere without user's consent.

[William Duyck]

I would imagine that is a reasonably easy thing to solve for as well… just store the images locally and delete them once the user has their own tiles, OR, load them from the mozilla cdn

www.webmaker.org William Duyck
Webmaker Mentor
Mozilla Foundation

Email: wdu...@mozillafoundation.org
Twitter: @FuzzyFox0

[David Rajchenbach-Teller]

My understanding is that they would indeed be bundled with Firefox or,
at most, downloaded from Mozilla along with the update checks.

Should the team in charge of this feature (I'm actually not sure who
that is) ponder alternatives, I'm sure that there will be a discussion
on the privacy channels.

Cheers,
David

On 2/14/14 12:16 PM, Nikos Roussos wrote:
> So these handpicked bookmarks will be bundled with Firefox? The only
> privacy concern I see here is whether or not Firefox will pull some
> images/logos and urls from somewhere without user's consent.

[Robert Kaiser]

Daniel Glazman schrieb:

Well, that, not so much. Given that AdBlock Plus is paid by ads. And
given that it was not created by the Mozilla organization, even though
it came out of its community.

This announcement though is coming out of the official organization.
That said, it's not about selling random ads, as others have cleared up.
The messaging has been messed up though, we need to improve on that for
sure with future endeavors.

KaiRo

[Zack Weinberg]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

On 02/11/2014 08:26 PM, Zack Weinberg wrote:
> regarding
> https://blog.mozilla.org/advancingcontent/2014/02/11/publisher-transformation-with-users-at-the-center/
>
>
:
>
>> Directory Tiles will instead suggest pre-packaged content for
>> first-time users. Some of these tile placements will be from
>> the Mozilla ecosystem, some will be popular websites in a given
>> geographic location, and some will be sponsored content from
>> hand-picked partners to help support Mozilla’s pursuit of our
>> mission. The sponsored tiles will be clearly labeled as such,
>> while still leading to content we think users will enjoy.
>
> I get why this might seem like a good idea if you don't think about
> it very hard, but it is a profoundly bad idea ...
....
[and then me again in a different message]
> I have hit my personal limit for responses to a single thread per
> day and will now shut up again until tomorrow evening.

I apologize for letting this discussion drop for two weeks. As you
might imagine, I do have actual work I have to do. :-) Also because
of actual work, I was not able to attend the "town hall" on this
topic. I regret any rehashing of stuff that was covered there.

Because of the delay, I'm going to write one big response to everyone
and post it once. If you asked me a direct question which I failed to
address, it's because I missed it in this voluminous thread; please
just go ahead and ask again. Please don't cc: me on replies to the
list, but if you want to take some subthread off-list that's fine.

So, this whole thing started because of a poorly-communicated plan to
have some "default" tiles on the new tab page for brand new users. I
concur with what Christian Heilmann said about the poor communication,
and have nothing further to add. The default tiles, in themselves,
are a fine idea. I wasn't sure what I thought of it initially, but on
reflection, having some signposts for people who may be completely new
to the Internets, or even computers in general -- here's how you can
get an email address, here's some options for online socializing, what
to do if you want your own website, what to do if you want to learn to
code, did you know this very browser is made by Viewers Like You and
you can help? That would be a Good Thing.

Where I -- apparently, still -- part company with the people pushing
this plan is: I think it would be a CATASTROPHICALLY BAD IDEA, both in
the short and the long run, to allow anyone to give us money in
exchange for placement on this screen. Let's start with the short-run
reasons. The most basic and immediate reason this is a bad idea is
that people will be angry at us over it; it will cost us more in
goodwill than we could possibly hope to get out of it in cash. In
fact, people are *already* angry with us just for suggesting it. We
might still be able to restore those people's good opinion of us if we
recant. Mitchell's blog post about it last week did not qualify as
recanting; she was quite clear that the possibility of paid placement
remains on the table.

I said that last time around, and nobody got it. I got lots of
responses drawing a moral equivalence between this and the existing
product placement in the search box and the bookmarks. The funny
thing is I agree with that moral equivalence -- but I think those are
*also* bad things, but bad things we are stuck with in the short run.
More on that point below. I also got responses which amounted to
"well, why should we listen to these people? Look at what we can get
out of this!" ("What" basically amounts to hypothetical reduced
dependence on the Google deal, afaict.) This is also a fair reaction;
people get mad at us all the time and often we decide that we don't
care. But in this case, we *should* care.

The first and most nakedly mercenary reason we should care is because,
unlike the search box, the unpopulated new-tab page is a
high-visibility but low-frequency context. The search box drives
traffic to Google every day from (to first order) every single one of
our users, so Google is prepared to give us a whole lot of money to
continue to be the default option in there; but you have to go out of
your way to think about it as something bought and paid for, and it
also happens to be the default that many of our users would pick
themselves, so nobody (to first order) gets angry with us for taking
that money.

The unpopulated new-tab page, in contrast, will be seen order of ten
times by each new user. There are anywhere between three and nine
slots on that page depending on how big your device is. That's not
enough ad impressions for anyone to give us very much money for. But
it is an *extremely* visible context, and a context in which most
people's immediate assumption is going to be that those slots are
bought and paid for. In fact, even if we *don't* take money for
placement on this screen, we may never be able to *convince* people we
don't! Thus, the potential loss of goodwill far outweighs the amount
of money we could plausibly hope to bring in.

Selling slots on the new-tab screen would also hamper our ability to
make the new-user experience *even better* in the future. Concrete
example: right now, the best "you probably want an email address,
huh?" option for someone completely new to the tubes is one of the big
webmail providers: they're reliable, they've got good spam filters,
they've got people whose job is to worry about the servers getting
cracked. But they also have significant drawbacks: many of them
suffer from UI designed without any idea of how email *ought* to be
used (probably the designers are too young to know), they don't
support PGP, all your email is stored in plaintext in a gigantic
database under the provider's control, etc. In the medium term,
something better may come along. If what's on the new-tab screen is
entirely up to us, we can just change it. If it's paid for, we have
to get out of a contract somehow. This already does come up with the
search box -- was it two or three years ago that Google wanted to be
the default in *all* locales, overriding localizers' preferences? I
don't recall how that turned out.

Moving on to the longer-term picture: because hypothetical advertisers
would be paying for not very many impressions per user, we would
naturally come under pressure to stop limiting the impressions to the
"until there is a populated history" first-few-runs setting. They'd
give us more money! I think this is what scares the commentariat
most: not the highly limited thing that has been proposed, but the
much more aggressive thing it could become. This is a *rational*
fear, and a scenario we should bend over backward to avoid.

Advertising inherently intrudes on people's attention; people learn to
ignore it; the advertisers respond by making the ads bigger, brighter,
flashier, and more carefully targeted; the people still learn to
ignore it, because brains are really good at ignoring things; the
advertisers escalate again, because what else are they going to do?
Fast forward a few cycles and you get the sites we've all seen where
the above-the-fold display is a logo, an article title, and
advertising; you have to scroll down to get the content you wanted.
And there's probably an "interstitial" pop-over ad, too. And *still*
nobody clicks on the ads, but now they are irritated and may close the
window. It doesn't just happen online; the billboards on I-80 in San
Francisco have gotten progressively bigger, brighter, and more
obnoxious over the past 25 years; you can measure the steady slow
decline of the newspaper industry by the proportion of the Sunday
edition that is useless supermarket coupons and suchlike.

I understand that part of why we're talking about new forms of product
placement is because we're organizationally uncomfortable with
depending so much on a single source of revenue, namely the Google
deal. But we've gotten lucky with that: it brings in lots of money,
but it doesn't bring us under pressure to escalate. (At least, not
that I know of. Perhaps the sales team has been quietly declining
propositions to bundle the Ask Toolbar in the default download for
years now. ;-) If we start soliciting deals from a wider market, for
a wider range of options, we'll be opening ourselves up to pressure to
escalate, to become ever more ad-driven, and ultimately to start doing
the sorts of clearly unethical things that everyone here agrees we
*shouldn't* do, but that otherwise-respectable companies keep being
caught doing. Swapping out ads in content for our own ads, adding ads
to pages that didn't have them in the first place, feeding user
tracking data to third parties, that sort of thing.

It is my considered opinion that the only way to be *sure* we don't
find ourselves over that kind of barrel in the future is not to do any
more business with the advertising industry than we already do, and to
make it an explicit long-term goal to phase out our existing
involvement. Yes, we should diversify our revenue stream; no, we
should not diversify within the advertising sector. Rather, we should
pursue entirely different sources of income. I can think of several
plausible options just off the top of my head. Revenue sharing with
carriers shipping Firefox OS phones is probably already being
negotiated, and could ramp up to big bucks more quickly than anything
else. Transaction fees on some sort of marketplace (for webapps?) is
the next most obvious option. Partnering with an online payment
provider, to allow in-browser identity to be a purchasing principal.
Merch and donations from users probably won't scale to big bucks, but
sponsorship deals from huge companies might. (It wouldn't be my
favorite thing, but I'd be okay with a line of type at the bottom of
the new-tab page saying something like "Development of Firefox 42 was
funded by [Weyland-Yuutani], the [Umbrella Corporation], [SPECTRE],
and [many others]. Did you know that [you can help]?" where square
brackets indicate hyperlinks. This strikes me as much less likely to
bring us under escalation pressure (because the organizations
mentioned are not paying for the mention, but to directly fund
development) and it's a thing that people have seen in other context
and understand, so it is also less likely to make them angry with us.
There should probably be an X to make it go away.)

To be clear, I can imagine ways in which the above suggestions for
alternative revenue would wind up putting us in an awkward position
with to our principles and/or our duty to our users, but I think they
are all relatively unlikely. This stands in stark contrast to
doubling down on the ad revenue, which I think is practically
*certain* to put us in an awkward position later if not sooner.

This also means that I am not a fan of new or proposed Web-platform
features whose primary function is to make advertising "less terrible"
and/or "less privacy-invasive". For all the same reasons that we
might find ourselves under pressure to escalate our *own* use of
advertising as a revenue stream, we would also be opening ourselves up
to "regulatory capture", as it were, if we added these kinds of
features. Gerv brought up a hypothetical situation in which each
browser installation, perhaps in concert with Mozilla-controlled
servers dedicated to the purpose, selects ads from a repertoire and
displays the most plausibly relevant ones to the user, based on some
sort of personalization algorithm carried out client-side. This would
in fact be a short-run improvement on the status quo, where the ad
servers make guesses about what's relevant and vacuum up as much data
as they can in order to attempt to personalize, and there's no one
involved who particularly cares about making sure the ads are not
malware. (I tell people to run aggressive ad blockers *just* because
of ad-sourced malware, nowadays.)

The catch, though, is that we would then have features directly
targeted at the ad industry, so their use cases would drive future
development of those features. Even with the best of intentions, I
seriously doubt we could succeed in keeping a privacy wall intact in
the long term; there are just too many ways that the advertisers could
potentially figure out what our ad-selection algorithm is doing, and
the more features we added, the easier it would get.

Even if this didn't happen, the features themselves would be sucking
up developer time and attention that would, I think, better be turned
to new platform features that offer Web companies *alternatives* to
in-site advertising. The obvious thing is, again, in-browser identity
as payment credential, and making it easier to put up a site that
takes payments. I haven't thought about this as much, but I'm sure
there are more things we could do.

Thank you all again for your attention.

zw
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