In early August, the Mozilla Foundation quietly began showing “Suggested tiles” when users open a new tab in its Firefox browser, the company announced last week.
Darren Herman, Mozilla VP of Content Services, wrote in a blog post that Suggested tiles began appearing in the American version of Firefox this summer from partners including Yahoo, Fortune and Quartz, as well as Make-a-Wish Foundation and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Above is an example of a suggested tile for Ars Technica content.
(Mozilla made Yahoo the default search engine on the US version of the browser last November, after ending a 10-year relationship with Google in that market.)
As Mozilla explains it, Suggested tiles aren’t a paid product at this point. “These partners are leaders in their categories, and we chose them for their ability to add value in Firefox. While we consider these to be commercial partnerships, we are not receiving money to show this content,” said Herman.
The company first floated the idea of ad tiles on the browser in February 2014, to many users’ dismay. After some bumps, the first paid product, called “Directory tiles” debuted in November with Booking.com, CVS Health and its media agency, Mindshare North America, appearing with a “sponsored” label.
Mozilla provides Suggested and Sponsored site partners with reports of aggregated data on user interactions such as click-through rates and how often users pinned the tile permanently or blocked it. Partners may also collect first-party data from users who click on their tiles. “Like any other Web link, the site owner has the option to establish or identify the user through a first-party cookie,” the company explains in an infographic about the tracking process. Users can opt out of seeing tiles by switching to Classic or Blank tab views.
Herman says, “We’re seeing high engagement rates with the content in the new tab. We’re also learning about the variables in the experience, such as the breadth of an interest category, the frequency of pacing of content, and of course, the creative assets themselves and how they affect the rate of engagement.”
The company is hoping to attract more advertising partners for its Tiles products at dmexco, a digital marketing conference in Cologne, Germany this week.
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