Mozilla drops support for suggested sponsored tiles

Dec 5, 2015 14:55 GMT  ·  By

Darren Herman, Mozilla's VP of Content Services, has just announced that Firefox will be dropping sponsored content from its browser, all except Pocket and Hello.

Back in 2014, Mozilla introduced "Sponsored Tiles" in its New Tab page, via the "Suggested Sites" feature. Every time users would open a new browser tab, if they didn't have any URLs in their browser's history, Firefox would show a list of suggested sites, some of which had a "Sponsored" label next to them.

No more sponsored ads in the Firefox New Tab page

These were services with which Mozilla had advertising agreements, and the company used the revenue to pay some of the Foundation's running costs.

After almost a year during which this feature was active, mainly in new browser installations where there was no previous browsing history to show a user's regularly-visited sites, Mozilla decided to drop the feature following intense criticism from its community.

"We have therefore made the decision to stop advertising in Firefox through the Tiles experiment in order to focus on content discovery," Mr. Herman explained in a blog post. "Advertising in Firefox could be a great business, but it isn’t the right business for us at this time because we want to focus on core experiences for our users."

What about Pocket integration?

As for Pocket, the other feature for which Mozilla was and still is intensely criticized, Mr. Herman didn't say anything, just like other Mozilla Foundation top-level personnel.

For the past few months, all of Mozilla's managers declined to speak on this subject or said that Mozilla has no mutual financial agreement with Pocket for its Pocket-in-Firefox integration.

Things changed yesterday when Mozilla Corp. chief legal and business officer Denelle Dixon-Thayer told a WIRED reporter that Mozilla has a revenue sharing agreement with Pocket's parent company, as well as with Telefonica, the company behind Firefox Hello a video conferencing solution also integrated shoved down Firefox users' throats.

While many users are still scoffing at the idea of having paid-for features inside Firefox, many of them fail to understand that Mozilla has yearly expenses of $318 million / €299 million (reported in 2014).

Wikipedia, a top 50 site, barely managed to collect $75 million / €69 million from user donations. While many want Mozilla to drop all of its financial agreements and live off user donations, this may not be economically possible.