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Comment by sayhello | Hacker News Reader

Engineer on the Tiles team here.

Revenue is not our primary objective. We really want to change how the industry works. At the moment, revenue is our way to say that we can make something that is viable and will work for everyone else.

It is something that is hard to condense into blog posts, because the topic is so touchy. That said, our primary goal is really to make a big change and to prove that it can be viable for others.

We're rethinking how digital advertising works. It is what makes the internet free for everyone. We're hoping to make a system that is effective, yet less annoying for users, and does not violate their right to privacy.

More on my reply on another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9588451

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> Revenue is not our primary objective.

This still creates an incentive to meet the needs of the advertisers (instead of the users) or you risk losing your new source of revenue. This conflict of interest in not theoretical - titling a blog post[1] "Providing a Valuable Platform for Advertisers, Content Publishers, and Users" already suggests where your priorities are. There is no middle ground here - users and advertisers have conflicting requirements.

> We really want to change how the industry works.

You are doing no such thing, and you (Mozilla/Firefox) don't have anywhere near the influence you would need to accomplish such a thing. Giving the ad industry a new place to put ads is not going to get them to stop (or even slow down) their current methods; you're just expanding the surface area they can utilize.

At best, the strategy at Mozilla appear to be appeasement, Neville Chamberlain style. Assuring us th "it is privacy for our time" further demonstrates who you really work for.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/advancingcontent/2015/05/21/providi...

[2] and DRM

Feel free to put ads on the new tabs page. Watch how many people change to Startpage or create their own startpage to get rid of them after searching Google on how to do so or switch to Chrome :)

Users hate ads. An increasing amount of more technical-savvy users are learning how to remove ads from their internet experience. The more intrusive and prevalent you try to make ads - the harder we'll try to get rid of them.

I consider ads on my new tab page to be intrusive. Luckily I created my own new tab page so this won't be an issue for me.

I observe that the ad industry will change (has changed) Firefox for the worse, and not that Firefox will change the ad industry for the better.

I do not want my browser to support the ad industry at all.

> It is what makes the internet free for everyone.

"The internet" isn't free for everyone, so saying that advertising is what makes it that way is quite mistaken.

Once you've paid to get on the internet, some of the content is free-of-(additional)-charge, and some of that free-of-(additional)-charge content is subsidized by advertising.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com