Mozilla’s decision to bail on its brief romance with its advertising products caught many insiders by surprise. The company said Monday it would end its sponsored tile offering, which it had released November 2014. Adzerk CEO James Avery, who was involved in briefings earlier this year meant to set the stage for Mozilla’s foray into […]
Mozilla is in a tough spot. Building a big ad business is key to the nonprofit’s well-publicized revenue diversification strategy, but many targeting techniques that are considered table stakes in digital advertising – such as cookie matching, third-party ad serving and CRM onboarding – are off limits. The main issue is not that Firefox users value their […]
Mozilla is putting the pedal down on its foray into digital ads. In recent weeks, the provider of open-source software has met with a range of ad tech companies in a bid to do more with the audience data and ad space generated by its still popular Firefox browser. In February and March, Mozilla’s content […]
Update 4:00 ET: In a recently-released blog post, Mozilla VP of content services Darren Herman announced the kick-off of an experimental program called Directory Tiles. Normally, when Firefox users open a new tab, they see tiles featuring images from sites they’d visited in the past. New users with no Firefox surfing history will, upon opening the […]
Mozilla wants to build content personalization into future generations of its products, and has recruited MDC Partners’ Darren Herman to lead that charge as VP for content services. Herman – a digital agency exec and startup entrepreneur – will head up a brand new Content Services division focused on building out a content experience within the […]
The advertising industry continues to debate privacy issues, including when advertisers may collect information about consumers. Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox browser, has added fuel to the controversy through its experiments with a cookie-blocking patch and a Cookie Clearinghouse—actions that the IAB’s Randall Rothenberg denounced as “arrogant.” Mozilla also announced in a blog post […]
Jonathan Mayer, a Stanford graduate student who has been a highly vocal advocate for consumer privacy, has resigned from the Tracking Protection Working Group, which is charged with setting the browser spec for a “Do Not Track” mechanism. In an email delivered yesterday afternoon to members of the Working Group, Mayer writes, “We do not […]
Two weeks after unveiling the “Cookie Clearinghouse,” a joint project between Mozilla and the Stanford Center for Internet and Society that would determine which websites are allowed to set cookies, Mozilla execs and CIS director of privacy Aleecia McDonald shed more light on the project today at a public discussion. “This initiative is about creating […]
As the debate over the intersection of consumer privacy and online advertising rages, a recent announcement that browser maker Mozilla would work with Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society to create a “cookie clearinghouse” appears to have poured more fuel on the fire. Debuted by Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich’s blog on June 19, and then reiterated in […]
Disagreements continue between the advertising industry and privacy advocates as advertisers point to potential weaknesses in the “Cookie Clearinghouse” project that Mozilla, maker of the Firefox browser, and the Stanford Center for Internet and Society’s have unveiled. The Cookie Clearinghouse promises to create two lists of domains: one for those that browsers would permit to […]
