Ad industry threatens Firefox users with more ads if Mozilla moves on tracking

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9237847/Ad_industry_threatens_Firefox_users_with_more_ads_if_Mozilla_moves_on_tracking_plans

by robin_reala • 13 years ago

79 111 13 years ago

computerworld.com

arocks• 13 years ago

> This is damaging to consumer interest and will undermine the Internet.

If that is the case, then people will eventually stop using Firefox and sites will continue to put annoying popups that confusingly say 'We use cookies, do you agree?"

However I doubt that is what users would prefer. I think they would prefer less privacy invading advertisements and more contextually relevant ones.

tokenizer• 13 years ago

This seems like a typical response. I'm curious if Mozilla will cave or continue.

While I like the idea of restricting third party cookies, I can understand the advertising businesses argument. They need to know what you want, so you can click on the ad, thereby providing a small amount of revenue to both website and advertiser.

claudius• 13 years ago

And what actual value is created by that?

richardwhiuk• 13 years ago

As the article notes, Apple's Safari browser has done this since launch, and is the most popular browser on mobile. There isn't a convincing argument that's going to cause Mozilla to cave here. This isn't a bold new move - it's Mozilla following Apple's lead, given that Microsoft has caused DNT to go into a death spiral.

I'm not sure why Mozilla would care about any business arrangement between some websites and advertisers.

h2s• 13 years ago

    > They'll see untargeted ads, which will look like spam

That's your loss, not mine, asshole.

skore8• 13 years ago

A thousand times this. "Oh no! Somebody else will stop doing our job for us, the horror!".

Go die in a thousand fucking fires, people working in advertising/marketing[0].

[0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDW_Hj2K0wo

(edit: Jeez, hyperbole detectors seem to have a calibration problem today.)

pud• 13 years ago

The irony in your comment is that YouTube exists because of advertising.

arrrg5• 13 years ago

So, uhm, people working at Google should die?

thomholwerda• 13 years ago

Wishing people to death really isn't cool. How would you feel if random people on the web told you they wanted you or your family to die?

Disagrement - okay - but calling for people to be killed - not okay, especially not over over something as utterly inconsequential as ads on a damn website. Remember that you just committed a very serious criminal offense with your post. I'm not sure how this reflects on the compony you work for as per your profile.

swombat• 13 years ago

To be honest, the targeted ads look even more like spam to me. I see ads for FreeAgent (a UK online accounting system) everywhere I go, whether to american sites or european ones. The irony is, I'm already a FreeAgent customer. But I think I searched for "Xero" once (one of FreeAgent's competitors) and so somehow now I'm being hounded by the retargeting systems FreeAgent is using.

Untargeted ads would be a bit less... boring...

gargoiler3• 13 years ago

The whole argument is a moot point. You can track people perfectly well without using cookies.

johnward• 13 years ago

Not really. I'd rather see something I'm interested in than some random crap.

lucb1e• 13 years ago

Safari is already doing the same for years.

This kind of privacy improvements actually make me want to donate to Mozilla to continue their efforts.

lucaspiller• 13 years ago

++ Chrome will just do whatever is good for Google (and hence other advertisers) unless they get pressured to do anything different. I'm glad to see Mozilla taking the user's side on this.

efdee• 13 years ago

I could be wrong, but hasn't this been an option in Chrome Preferences for ages?

Samuel_Michon3• 13 years ago

“Safari is already doing the same for years.”

Indeed, and like the article points out, the ANA and IBA just haven't been paying attention. From the article: “By default, Safari blocks third-party cookies, and has since its 2003 debut. The iOS version of Safari has done the same since its 2007 inception.”

By my calculations, there are a lot more devices running Safari than there are running Firefox:

There are 1.25 billion desktops and notebooks in use. According to NetApps Market Share, 17.3% of those use Firefox (216 million), 5.42% use Safari (68 million). There are 400 million iOS devices, all of those have Safari. So Safari is installed on twice as many computing devices than Firefox is. Now, total time spent browsing on desktops vs mobile is not equal, but it's getting there, especially as tablets become dominant.

This conclusion is reached by the author of the article, as well: “In the last 12 months, mobile's share of all browser usage has almost doubled, climbing from 7.2% to 13.2%. At that pace, mobile browsing will account for 20% of the total by the end of April 2014.”

shawabawa3• 13 years ago

> we will lose the opportunity to monitor and protect our privacy

How exactly will blocking 3rd party cookies stop us protecting our privacy?

I could understand if they said something like "it will stop targeted ads", but that is just clearly bullshit

thexa4• 13 years ago

Because they;ll switch to different methods of tracking. For example, you can be tracked almost uniquely by the plugins you currently have installed. It's harder to mask that than to remove a tracking cookie.

Nursie6• 13 years ago

So we stop giving away information like that too?

I'm still really not sure why my requesting information from a web server should leak any information about me beyond an IP address.

kislayverma• 13 years ago

Bigoted idiots. This rant is surprisingly similar to press release before every western invasion of a country - freedom, threat to 'small' consumers etc.

"we will lose the opportunity to monitor and protect our privacy" Really now!!! So my privacy is best served by sharing all my data? This is so Orwellian. Noam Chomsky should have something to say on this :)

judofyr• 13 years ago

I almost find this a bit cute:

> Without third-party cookies, they will not be able to participate in the existing industry system for privacy protection.

Their privacy is still protected, but they can't participate in the privacy protection system! Oh noes!

> They will see an increase in the irrelevant spam advertising served to them

So you're telling me that when you serve ads for "RightWingNews.com, LiberalOasis.com, MotherhoodWTF.com, and SuburbanDaddy.com [and] thousands of small businesses" there's no possible way to find relevant ads without tracking the user?

mkmkmmmmm2• 13 years ago

Using Firefox and AdBlock Plus I actually expect I will continue to see exactly zero irrelevant spam advertising. Still, it's funny to see the mental gymnastics going on when someone obviously wants to exploit people but does not want to admit it.

ne0phyte2• 13 years ago

Well, there will be new ways to embed ads. Like ads between related articles or when you scroll through results and one of them has 6pt "Ad" in the corner but looks exactly like the real search results.

They will find a way to make it really hard to block that stuff based on generic rules or by blocking the servers that serve the ads.

relix3• 13 years ago

By running AdBlock, you're the one doing the exploiting. It's no different than pirating stuff, you don't have the moral high ground here.

thenomad4• 13 years ago

Whilst I'm not convinced by the IAB's arguments here, it's worth noting that not all sites - indeed, most sites - aren't as easy to target as the examples you give.

Speaking as someone who buys a fair bit of advertising, there are thousands of sites in the inventory of most RTB sellers which I'll just skip over unless their inventory is really cheap, because it's very hard to figure out a single product that most of the site's readership would use.

(Example site - Photobucket. What ads would obviously make money on there?)

Also, for quite a few sites where the core demographic does have some obvious interests, there aren't that many well-paying advertisers for that demo. Retargeting and similar tracking-based advertising systems help fill in the gaps when the core advertisers aren't buying all the inventory.

kolektiv• 13 years ago

The part that I particularly like actually is slightly different to that:

> "They'll see untargeted ads, which will look like spam. We have to get this information to them somehow."

Oh really, you have to get this information to me? Seriously? I didn't ask for it, I have no desire for it, no you don't have to. You want to, because someone is paying you to do so. Yet another case of someone thinking they have a right to a business model. No you don't. If it fails it fails. Find something to sell that people want (or at least don't despise enough to actively put you out of business).

af3• 13 years ago

Just to make sure, in Chrome this option could be enabled in Preferences?

sirn• 13 years ago

It's a different feature.

The gist of this new behavior is a change from Allow All Cookies to Allow Cookies Only From Visited Domains. This is unlike Block All Third-Party Cookies option that existed in both Firefox and Chrome in the way that third party cookie is still accepted but only if user ever visited that "third-party" website before.

The behavior may be less strict than Block All Third-Party Cookies option and probably won't make much difference for Facebook or Google's tracking cookies (if you use them). But being the new default option means smaller players going to take a direct hit. Which is good.

jcr• 13 years ago

  > "The Internet was created on the foundations of advertising," said Jaffe.

This Jaffe character is factually wrong in most of his statements, but claiming the above is wrong to the degree of at least blatantly ignorant, or more likely to the degree of willfully and maliciously misleading.

Jgrubb2• 13 years ago

Well sure, if you're going to take it literally, the foundation of the internet has more to do with software and Linux and TCP than advertising.

The fact is though, and I'm surprised to find that I must be the only HN regular who finds himself working in the world of marketing and advertising, that a hell of a lot of the internet and people working on making it better, not just worse, is paid for by advertising money.

The vitriol that's on display from everybody on this thread is, in a big way, as myopic and ignorant and full of self-righteousness as the guy they're calling names (who I agree is all of the above, yes).

johnsoft• 13 years ago

"Some sites nowadays depend on advertising as a revenue stream," is a far cry from "The Internet was created on the foundations of advertising." Reading through http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet, if I had to guess what motivated the people who worked on those early networks, I would say it had more to do with the potential to advance humanity with accessible, near-instant communication than it did the ability to serve ads to people. Ads were not on anyone's mind when they first saw text appear in real-time from thousands of miles away. Ads were just a single application for the new technology, and they came about much later.

hhw• 13 years ago

Don't you mean BSD rather than Linux, as BSD was the reference TCP/IP implementation for DARPA?

Samuel_Michon3• 13 years ago

“the foundation of the internet has more to do with software and Linux”

Linux is barely 20 years old, the Internet has been around for decades before that. In recent years, it seems like more and more people are using ‘Linux’ in a context where they actually mean ‘Unix’. Just like the Internet and the web are not the same, these distinctions matter.

“ I must be the only HN regular who finds himself working in the world of marketing and advertising”

Nope, there are plenty of us here.

sesqu• 13 years ago

Ads appeared in the late 90's. That's a far cry from even being the foundation of the web.

Ads are very important to the web as it exists, but to claim anything foundational is just ignorant. Formative could be argued, though.

sneak• 13 years ago

The intense pushback from the ad industry is testament to the fact that they're on the right track for user privacy.

Carry on, Mozilla!

caf2• 13 years ago

Correct. "Henhouse security improved - foxes appalled."

gargoiler3• 13 years ago

That's extremely naive. You can track people perfectly well without using cookies.

jeltz• 13 years ago

He said that they are on the right track. Not that this will be the only change needed to protect the privacy of the users.

Silhouette6• 13 years ago

In their blogs, the two groups lambasted Mozilla, predicting dire consequences, including the shuttering of small businesses and small websites, fewer choices for online users, and more ads in Firefox.

Or small businesses will have to bring their revenue in by other means, such as charging real money for valuable content and services, or simply running ads themselves, targeted at their own viewers' likely interests, without relying on third party middlemen. Either of those outcomes sucks for the middlemen, but not so much for anyone else.

Fortunately for the advertisers and the user-as-product platform services, micropayments are mostly still wishful thinking, so they're not likely to see this happen on a wide scale in the immediate future. But if they think small -- or even large -- businesses on the web can only survive by using their ad networks, sooner or later they're going to get a rude awakening about the sustainability of their business model.

I imagine there will be some last gasp effort to legislate that people can't view sites without viewing the ads, shortly before the ad networks finally retreat into obscurity, but that's so user-hostile that I don't see it gaining much traction.

In the meantime, the first team who manage to gain traction with a social network that is totally user-focused and charges a small annual fee for basic features and a few more small fees for top-ups is probably going to be very rich. And for the smaller sites, anyone with enough traffic visiting say a blog to make real money via the ad networks is probably also in a position to negotiate a direct ad deal and cut out the middleman for better returns.

mfjordvald• 13 years ago

> Either of those outcomes sucks for the middlemen, but not so much for anyone else.

It actually also sucks for the businesses themselves, at least in my case. I'd much rather spend my time creating valuable content for everyone than creating valuable content for a few who pay me.

Of course there are alternatives I can try, I can keep content free and solicit donations, I can create various merchandise or I can directly sell advertising space hosted on my own site. All these options essentially take time away from creating content in the first place. My fear is that I'll be too busy trying to make money to make good content. Ad networks at least have the benefit of a "fire and forget" and having someone manage that whole aspect of my business, leaving me to work on content.

I totally get the whole point of no tracking, I'm not even really against it. I'm just trying to point out that it's not just the big business ad networks that will be affected here.

Silhouette6• 13 years ago

I sympathise, because I also run a couple of low-traffic web sites purely to share information I've found useful or thoughts that might help others. Then again, I never expected to make any money from those sites, and I don't run ads on them either.

Whatever we might ideally like as site creators, I think the reality is that small-scale, targeted-ad funding for web sites, where we create something like a personal blog or a site with some articles and then slap something like Google Ads on them to cover the hosting costs, isn't going to be a sustainable model.

Instead, I think sites like that are either going to be done for love (as they always used to be), or done for profit (and run as a business, including marketing and advertising arrangements or some other revenue stream), or perhaps hosted on some sort of aggregator site that does have critical mass to run a cost-effective ad program even if its individual contributors wouldn't (which might be a business, or might simply be a bunch of like-minded individuals clubbing together to split their hosting costs).

There might even be some sort of positive cultural shift over time, where people stop wanting everything for free and start to realise that you get what you pay for and good sites are worth supporting. I don't expect that many people are going to actively donate to sites any time soon, but then you only need a few who do to pay an annual hosting bill for a low traffic personal site.

So while I do see your point and understand your concern, I don't think we're talking about the fall of the Internet here. Little guys like you and me will keep our sites running one way or another and still spend our time on content we think is worthwhile.

thenomad4• 13 years ago

simply running ads themselves, targeted at their own viewers' likely interests, without relying on third party middlemen

One minor point here - speaking as both an advertising guy and someone who runs content-based websites, this is much harder than it may appear. I qualify as at least a professional if not an expert in making money off website space, and I still frequently find it difficult to beat (intelligently set up) Google Adsense for raw CPM.

For someone with no experience or interest in making money directly off advertising space, it'll be much harder, and I'd expect most people trying this to take a pretty significant revenue loss in the short term. That may reverse itself in the long term - there are big advantages to running your own ads if you're prepared to put the time in - but the initial income slump will be painful.

Silhouette6• 13 years ago

I still frequently find it difficult to beat (intelligently set up) Google Adsense for raw CPM.

Fair enough, but I think the big question is absolute rather than relative: do you still make enough handling ads directly to be financially viable?

I'm genuinely curious about how many sites these days are small enough that they're basically amateur operations, yet make significant revenues from the ad networks (which is obviously a prerequisite for making significant revenue losses if they have to move to another funding model).

I just don't see it. Ad revenues have been falling like a stone since forever, so these days low-traffic personal sites are lucky to even cover their hosting costs, never mind making any real money. Aren't most sites with enough traffic to make serious money via the ad networks effectively professional sites being run as businesses already?

That may reverse itself in the long term - there are big advantages to running your own ads if you're prepared to put the time in - but the initial income slump will be painful.

I think that's the key thing, really. This is a long game, and fear of change because it will be awkward for some people in the short term generally leads to stagnation and never discovering ways of doing things that might be better for (almost) everyone after even a brief period of adjustment.

arethuza• 13 years ago

I've only recently installed AdBlock as, although I know advertising revenue is important to some of the small sites I use, I've been a bit perturbed as to how creepy a lot of online advertising has become. I spend a few minutes thinking about buying something (e.g. an electric raclette coooker) and for weeks I am pestered on loads of different websites about them - which I find really annoying.

brador• 13 years ago

Am I the only person who actually likes relevant ads? I like finding new things I didn't know existed to buy...

awjr• 13 years ago

That's fine until you go to a site looking to buy something for your daughter. Suddenly the rest of my day's browsing is polluted by pink ponies.

skore8• 13 years ago

Or just check out some weird novelty item on Amazon out of curiosity. Then you also get emails about it for the rest of your life.

Kiro2• 13 years ago

That's not a very relevant argument against remarketing.

_delirium• 13 years ago

I like ads relevant to the site I'm visiting. I don't like ads that try to connect to something I was doing previously. Those break my concentration, and seem somewhat trollish. E.g. I'm trying to book tickets for a trip, then I need to switch to researching something else and am blocking out the trip from my mind for a bit. It's not helpful to have your own little troll Clippy following you around the internet asking around every corner, "I notice you're trying to get work done, but what about that trip you haven't booked yet?", even when you're visiting sites completely unrelated to travel. Yeah, I know about that trip, I'm just not working on it right now, because I have other things to do, and I don't need to be reminded about it on every goddamn page I visit.

It seems like the explicit purpose of those retargeting ads is to distract me from what I'm currently trying to concentrate on, by reminding me of something I was doing previously. That's not something I want, and in fact I find it quite intrusive.

oneandoneis2• 13 years ago

The one thing that irritates me most about them is they aren't smart enough to STOP.

Say I google "laser pen". Suddenly, I get ads about lasers! Cool!

Then I buy one of these laser pens. The ads have done their job. Lucky them.

But now that I've bought a laser pen, I no longer need to be shown ads for them - I won't buy another one, so for God's sake, stop showing me ads for them! Learn to know when an ad has served its purpose and move on.

I did a search for "injury lawyer" a while ago, I swear it was six months before I stopped seeing ambulance-chaser adverts on every damn website I visited...

Nursie6• 13 years ago

Can't stand 'em, find the whole thing creepy as hell.

I find out about new (tech) things by reading tech sites, which probably means I'm a sucker for advertorial, but at least I'm going out looking for info rather than having it shoved into my face.

tinco• 13 years ago

"The facts are that [Firefox users] will get more ads, not less, and those ads will not be tailored to their interests," he said. "They'll see untargeted ads, which will look like spam.""

If this is truly the case then Firefox users will notice and either turn the third party cookies back on or complain/switch to chrome. If the effect is that big, and people want to see the targeted ads, what do the ad networks stand to lose?

Firefox is making a right move, there is now a distinctive conscious choice you can make: Firefox, privacy by default. Chrome and IE can never counter that (because of their affiliations with ad networks). Maybe its not the biggest reason to use a browser, but it's a big one and it enforces Firefox's position in the market.

ne0phyte2• 13 years ago

Chrome has an option to enable the Do-Not-Track request and to block all 3rd party cookies already. In the settings dialog that is, not in the chrome:// tweaks.

Jgrubb2• 13 years ago

what do the ad networks stand to lose?

It's less about the actual ad networks. It's more that the sites who display ads that are better targeted and have a higher click through rate can charge more money for them and run fewer of those specific ads as a consequence. Businesses that are able to better target ads at people who might actually be in the market based on recent browsing behavior can spend their advertising money on reaching a higher quality audience. The alternative is that you get a spray of all kinds of ads that have no relevance.

Kiro2• 13 years ago

I've said it before but in my opinion retargetting is a win-win-win situation for advertisers, publishers and visitors. Being retargetted has improved my online experience a lot since I only get ads I actually care about.

wkearney99• 13 years ago

There's an old saying that goes "Don't piss on me and tell me it's raining." that seems applicable here. The ad industry is crying foul that a browser comes with it's own umbrella against their torrent of waste.

EwanToo• 13 years ago

You can enable this in Firefox today, by going to about:config

and setting the network.cookie.cookieBehavior value to 1 (0 is the default)

You can also try setting network.cookie.thirdparty.sessionOnly to 1 to allow third party cookies during the session, but then delete them afterwards

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Cookies_Preferences_in...

huhtenberg• 13 years ago

Also, consider setting

  network.http.sendRefererHeader 1

as per discussion from yesterday on cross-domain referrer headers. See [0] for details.

[0] http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.http.sendRefererHeader

qompiler• 13 years ago

Firefox should enable AdBlock plus by default in the next update.

scrrr• 13 years ago

And that would probably increase their market share..

Nursie6• 13 years ago

"The facts are that [Firefox users] will get more ads, not less, and those ads will not be tailored to their interests" he said. "They'll see untargeted ads..."

OH THE HORROR!

fear91• 13 years ago

"; we will lose the opportunity to monitor and protect our privacy; "

I laughed so hard at this one.

Great move by the Firefox team. It made me donate for their cause.

monsterix• 13 years ago

Good riddance ANA/IAB.

Better sense would have prevailed if you'd asked the choice been given to Firefox users to allow third party cookies if they wanted it.But no, you'd rather lash out on Mozilla. Good job - the two of you ad presidents! :)

ginko• 13 years ago

Firefox should include an ad blocker by default, then.

DanBC2• 13 years ago

When I listen to advertisers talk I realise that I understand the individual words, but all strung together they mean something different, and reality starts to slide away until I'm through the looking glass in a weird world where "We want to show you our ads" is the same as "Why don't you want to see our brilliant content? People love those shouting smileys and buzzing mosquitoes!"

Me saying "Really, I only leave ads on to give a smidgen of money to the content provider; I'd much rather make micro-payments direct" is interpreted as me being an obscure hard-line communist.

I genuinely feel lost when listening to advertisers

moron4hire• 13 years ago

Lies. It's just all lies.

obsession• 13 years ago

I wonder if the move to create Google Chrome was a due to a concern that Firefox would disturb Google's ad-serving business some day.

tpetrina• 13 years ago

This is a battle they (advertisers) simply can't win. If they increase the number of ads for Firefox users, Firefox installation might suggest ad-blocking software to users. If we have a "browser choice screen" as a punishment for Microsofts abuse of monopoly, who can deny adding the same "choice" screen for ad-blocking software to a major browser?

After all, public should be educated about ads.

hackernewbie• 13 years ago

This should shove the internet into a more sophisticated mode of advertising (if more clandestine in many ways, shills ahoy). It's unprecendentedly pathetic to see companies worrying about their outmoded methods and hegemony on content choice. Imagine when content choice is purely based on relevance and recommendation (and shills).

p6v53as• 13 years ago

We will soon have these ad networks to enforce us with laws that prohibit adblocks all together by calling the act of blocking ad as "piracy" and "theft" since we are not "paying" for the content provided. We can't let that happen, these networks must be put down as fast as possible till while they can't influence the government. Oh, wait, it's too late...

Ad industry threatens Firefox users with more ads if Mozilla moves on tracking

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