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On 03/03/2014 09:55 AM, Robert Kaiser wrote:
> Zack Weinberg schrieb:
>> 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.
>
> Then please watch
>
https://air.mozilla.org/town-hall-directory-tiles/ before making
> any further conclusions as there's quite a bit of good information
> there to build on.
I simply do not have the time - not now, not in the foreseeable future.
Is there a transcript perhaps?
>> 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.
>
> Apparently you don't know what the plan is, then. From all I heard,
> there are no plans to allow "anyone" to give us money for
> placement. We will only allow very carefully hand-picked
> organizations/companies that align with our mission
When I said "[we should not] allow anyone to give us money ...", I
meant to convey "we should allow NOBODY to give us money for placement
on the new tab page". Another phrasing: "We should not take money in
exchange for placement on the new tab page, period."
(This seems like possibly a confusion of language? I have seen
non-native speakers of English write "we should not allow anyone to X",
intending to mean what a native speaker would mean by "we should not
allow *just* anyone to X". Without the "just", the phrase in English
means that no one should be allowed.)
The act of accepting money in this context is, *in and of itself*, a bad
idea. It does not matter who we take the money from.
> An example was that if you are in Germany, putting an open-minded
> high-quality news site on there - but if that's "Frankfurter
> Allgemeine", "Süddeutsche Zeitung", "Die Zeit", "Der Spiegel" or
> something else in that same category might not matter.
Not knowing any of these news sites, I will grant that they are all more
or less interchangeable and respectable ...
> And why not accept some money for selecting a specific one of
> those?
Because it will cost us the goodwill of our users to accept money at all
for this, and because it sets a bad precedent.
> Money is not evil. It's what people do with it that can be good or
> evil.
This is maybe the right moment to clarify that I am making two
philosophical claims, one strong and one weak (in the mathematician's
sense of those words). Neither of them is about money; they are both
about *advertising*. Based on those claims, I am making recommendations
for Mozilla's short- and long-term strategic plans, and those
*recommendations* are about money, but the money is not the issue; the
advertising is the issue.
The strong claim is that advertising is *always* harmful to some extent.
Often it is the diffuse sort of harm that economists call a "negative
externality," and (less) often it is the least-bad available option in
the circumstances. But there is always harm done, and so whenever you
are thinking about advertising - whether as a source, or as a venue -
you need to be thinking about harm reduction.
It is also part of this strong claim that *in the long run*
organizations that provide a venue for advertising (like a newspaper, or
a billboard broker, or, in fact, us) tend to progressively increase the
harmfulness of the advertising that they accept. I see this present
discussion as an example of that very scenario: we have historically
kept the ads to unobtrusive parts of the UI, but now, with the
(perfectly sensible) aim of diversifying our revenue sources, we are
considering making them much more obtrusive and therefore more harmful.
Based on this strong claim, it is my position that *all* of Mozilla's
present sources of income, except for direct donations from users, are
causes of harm, and that *in the long run* we should wean ourselves off
all of them. It is also my position that we should not add *new*
sources of income which correspond to new advertisers and/or new
contexts for advertising, in order that we avoid the progressive
escalation of harmfulness that ad venues tend to fall into.
Now, I don't expect everyone to agree with me about the strong claim,
and I acknowledge that my recommendations based on it are only suitable
for the long-term. We are not in a position to drop all of the existing
ad revenue tomorrow. That brings me to the weak claim. The weak claim
is simply that advertising on the new-tab page is an especially bad idea
and we should not do it. This is independent of the strong claim: even
if you think advertising is in general a positive force for good, I hope
to persuade you that advertising on the new-tab page is a bad idea and
we should not do it. It is a bad idea for simple, short-term,
completely tactical reasons, such as "our users will hate it and they
will hate us for doing it."
>> 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.
>
> That's something where apparently you disagree with the team
> responsible for this as they seem to think it is enough.
Correct. I am not privy to actual numbers, of course, but based on
general knowledge of how much people pay for analogous things, I think
that the *total* revenue available from "sponsored tiles" cannot
possibly even reach 5% of the revenue we get from Google for the one
searchbox placement.
But this is not actually the right comparison. If we could completely
replace the Google revenue, but in exchange we would lose half our
current userbase, I bet you would agree with me that that was a bad
move. This isn't going to do that, but it may well do something just as
damaging in the long run: I wouldn't be surprised if it cut our *new
continual user* rate in half. Think about it: you load up your shiny
new Firefox and the first thing you see is a screen full of ads. It
would be rational (if perhaps erroneous) to think that the ads will
continue to be everywhere. It would be rational to hit Alt-F4 and never
run the browser again.
To some extent I am worried that this is going to happen even if we
*don't* take money for default tiles. It will be absolutely critical
that the visual design of the page makes it very clear that these are
*not* ads. It may not be possible to do this with the existing
screenshot-based design. But at least, if we don't take money, we can
say so, and some of the people we would otherwise have lost will
believe us.
>> 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.
>
> We just have to make contracts that are no longer than
> "medium-term". Or contracts that allow us to vote for not showing
> them at any time and just not getting money then. That's all
> solvable :)
I am unconvinced that this will actually work when push comes to shove,
but perhaps I am worrying about things that don't need to be worried
about right now. :-)
>> 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.
>
> That's something we should be mindful of for sure and I agree -
> but I also think that what should ensure us is internal pressure to
> work for the users and stick to our mission, we as the community,
> both paid and volunteer, need to keep our eyes on it and push for
> correction if something moves in the wrong direction.
1) Right, so, this is me providing that internal pressure: Advertising
on the new tab page is a bad idea and we should not do it.
2) I think you underestimate the ease of creeping additions to something
that's already there. Better to stop this bad idea before it ever gets
started.
>> 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?
>
> We as Mozilla control what's being shown there, I trust this will
> not be remotely loaded, esp. not without our control. So we can
> make sure there's no actually annoying tiles
"Your analytics indicate that nobody clicks on our ads. We will not be
renewing our purchase unless you make them more prominent."
Yes, I would hope that our sales team has the guts and the management
backup required to say no to that, but wouldn't it be better to not put
them in that position in the first place? And wouldn't it be better to
search out sources of revenue that don't potentially evaporate in this
manner?
>> 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.
>
> We also could work to improve how Internet advertising works, which
> would actually be what our mission agrees with. Mozilla is not
> around to turn its eyes away from bad things that happen, but to
> try and make things better.
[Strong claim] Internet advertising is harmful in and of itself. Mozilla
should work to *get rid of it* - we should develop mechanisms for our
own revenue, and for website revenue, that *don't* involve advertising.
Working to make advertising *less harmful* is at best a distraction and
at worst makes us complicit in the harm done.
[Weak claim] Advertising on the new tab page does not in any way give us
leverage to improve how Internet advertising works. To the contrary, it
is, for reasons described above, especially likely to anger our users
*and* especially likely to put us in the position of having to choose
between revenue and our users' interests. It is a bad idea and we
should not do it.
>> 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.
>
> Please bring those up with the team working on this, I'm sure they
> are interested.
I am not aware of any more direct way of communicating with "the team
working on this"; in fact, I don't even know who they are.
>> (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].
>
> So you are OK with ads after all, as that's not really any
> different.
[Strong claim] No, it's not really different. It is, however, carefully
tailored to minimize the harm: it is text that does not draw itself to
you-the-user's attention, it does not imply that you-the-user should
care, and - most importantly - the mentioned organizations *did not* pay
for the privilege of being displayed and linked there. They made a
direct contribution to further development of Firefox, and we are
graciously thanking them for it. That may sound like hair-splitting,
but it matters: it insulates the sales people from the scenario where
they demand more prominent placement, because the funding is not in
exchange for the placement. So, while it is still a thing that I would
be disappointed to see us do, it is less harmful than the proposal on
the table, and I suspect it has better revenue potential as well.
[Weak claim] We may have hit a cultural difference here - am I right in
thinking that you are not a resident of the USA? This is patterned on a
funding model that is very common in the USA but perhaps not elsewhere.
Cultural institutions - museums, theatres, universities, religious
buildings, public radio and TV, that sort of thing - seek out large
donations ("grants") from corporations, charitable foundations, private
individuals with a lot of money, and the government. The money is given
in direct support of the institution; it is not in exchange for anything
other than the institution's continued existence (or some specific
project, like the construction of a new building). But the institution
thanks its sponsors by, for instance, putting up a discreet sign with a
list of their names.
This is not, culturally, considered to be advertising, but there is a
gray area, most often seen with sports stadiums and university
buildings, where the building is named or renamed for one major donor.
This often *does* amount to advertising, particularly if the money is
explicitly in exchange for "naming rights". At that point, see above
regarding the strong claim.
>> 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".
>
> So you'd rather let the advertising industry pervert even more
> features of the Internet (they already did it to cookies, which
> were good and useful originally) rather than having us as stewards
> of the Open Web help them to actually do what they want in a more
> user- and privacy-friendly way? Here I surely do not agree with
> you.
[Strong claim: everything below this point]
The Open Web is not best served by better advertising; it is best served
by *no* advertising; by revenue models that do not require advertising.
As such, why should we help the ad industry at all? Why should we not
*hinder* them to the maximum extent achievable via technology?
(I would support shipping an ad-blocker in the default install, enabled,
with a fairly aggressive set of rules; all else aside, it would reduce
our users' exposure to malware.)
>> 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.
>
> If they intentionally *want* to invade user privacy, they just will
> work with something else than our tools and go for the "evil"
> methods in use today or other privacy-invasive hacks that can be
> found. But you assume that they are evil by choice, which I very
> much doubt.
Not by choice or intention, perhaps, but because the business they are
in does not allow them to be otherwise.
> They want to deliver value to their customers by displaying
> something of value to the users - ultimately they want users to buy
> something from their customers, usually, and that will only work if
> the user gets some positive impression.
I cannot be this charitable toward the advertising industry at large.
Even the least obtrusive, most personally relevant, and least
privacy-intrusive ad is an attempt to steal people's attention - again,
perhaps not out of malice, but necessarily, because that is how
advertising works - and attention is something I have all too little of.
As such I am not interested in helping them; I am interested in
destroying them.
> If we do not assume that one of the largest industries of this
> planet is intentionally out there to do evil
Intention has nothing to do with it, and so "evil" is inapposite, but it
is an industry harmful by nature, and we should not cooperate with it.
> What does payment handling have to do with actually finding the
> products and services you are interested in in the first place?
Nothing; but assuming people have already found something they want,
it is useful to make it easier for them to exchange money for it.
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