Mozilla to Ad World: Start Respecting the User

Mozilla has a message for the advertising industry: Start respecting the user or face a backlash.

Firefox is starting to sell ads of its own and it doesn't like what it's seeing: "You see all these things about optimization and data and about real time and all the chatter about brands wanting to own their users and the technology that has helped the process -- but nowhere in these halls, or very little, have we heard anything about putting the user first." said Darren Herman, Mozilla VP content services.

Mozilla is in the process of introducing two forms of advertising into its browser. The first is called "directory tiles," where the company will sell advertisers a tile on the new-tab page of newly installed browsers. The second is called "enhanced tiles" which lets publishers and brands pay to customize their tile when it shows up in a "most visited" tile on the browser's new-tab page. 

The ads, with potential to reach Mozilla's hundreds of millions of users, are unlike nearly every ad placement on the internet: there are no cookies, no third-party ad servers, no brand pixels and users can opt out of seeing them altogether.  Firefox's goal is to let the user own his/her own environment.

Source: http://adage.com/article/digital/mozilla-ad-world-start-respecting-user/295336/