Mozilla to provide Firefox with ads

Mozilla is going to place ads in its Firefox browser. The ad will become part of the ‘Directory Tiles’, which serve blocks of content to users that they may find interesting, such as popular websites. The ad is for new users only.

The Directory Tiles are nine rectangles that a Firefox user sees when he opens a new tab. The rectangles eventually show the websites the user visits frequently, but for new users the boxes are empty. Mozilla wants to change that.

For new users, the organization will therefore fill the blocks itself. “Some tiles come from Mozilla’s ecosystem, some are populated with websites that are popular in a particular region, and some are sponsored content from Mozilla partners so we can fulfill our mission,” said Darren Herman of Mozilla’s Content Services division.

The number of new user impressions would be 31 million per month, out of a total of 100 billion for the US alone, a Mozilla spokesperson told AdAge. Now Mozilla is still 97 percent dependent on money that comes in through deals with search engines. Mozilla made the announcement at an Interactive Advertising Bureau meeting. Last year, Mozilla announced that it would block third-party cookies for ads by default in Firefox, which the organization came under considerable criticism from the IAB.