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Edward Smith/EMPICS Entertainment
experimental ads
Mozilla plans to test sponsored ads on Firefox
Sponsored content and ads will be part of a number of experiments Mozilla will be carrying out over the next few months.
FIREFOX USERS WILL start seeing ads appearing in the new tab page as Mozilla announced it will be testing a new advertising plan.
Whenever a new tab is opened on Firefox, nine tiles are displayed showing screenshots of websites that its user visits the most.
Firefox will be placing ads and sponsored content alongside these boxes to see how users respond to them and test their effectiveness.
The news comes a few months after Mozilla originally announced its intention to experiment with the new tabs page, which also included promotional tiles. However, users were concerned due to the wording of the post, which many users felt was an indirect way of saying it would be introducing ads.
The Vice President of Firefox Johnathan Nightingale said in a blog post that it won’t “turn Firefox into a mess of logos sold to the highest bidder.”
It will be testing out new features to see if it can make certain features more useful and see which ones are worth keeping or removing. Testing out sponsored tabs and ads will also be included in these experiments.
These tests are purely to understand what our users find helpful and what our users ignore or disable – these tests are not about revenue and none will be collected. Sponsorship would be the next stage once we are confident that we can deliver user value.
He also said that while the team will experiment with Firefox across platforms, it will “talk about what we learn before anything ships to our release users.”
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