Mozilla Firefox is well known for providing users with unique customizable extensions and plugins. Mozilla announced this week they will start selling ads on their directory tiles in order to gain a new line of revenue stream. The company said in a blog posting on Tuesday that they are currently reaching out to potential corporate sponsors about the directory tiles program. The project will be aimed at targeting first-time Firefox users.
Prior to this announcement, new Firefox users would see nine blank tiles when they fire up their browser the first time. As the new user explore more websites, their directory tile would be filled with their most-visited or recently visited websites. Mozilla’s directory tile intends to display the most popular sites by location, as well as sponsored websites that will be clearly labeled as promoted to first time users.
90% of Mozilla’s yearly revenue comes from Google through the Firefox search box. As Firefox’s market share continues to decline, the nonprofit foundation is in need of seeking a new revenue stream. Back in the day, Firefox was once the most popular alternative to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. These day, Google Chrome is chopping away at Firefox’s market share. Even though Mozilla is currently one of Google’s major partners, in terms of negotiating their contract in the future, Google will have a stronger hand. Unless Bing steps in, Mozilla won’t have much of a better chance negotiating with Google.
Mozilla is hardly the first nonprofit faced with the problem of raising funds. A possible alternative to the directory tile would be if if Firefox and Thunderbird had donation icons.
When you click on the image above, you will see a complete history of all the browser usage history. Here are some stats:
In 2002, Internet Explorer had 83.4% of the market.
Firefox joined the market in 2003 with 7.2%.
In 2008, Google Chrome came into the market with 3.6%. IE had 46% of the share, while Firefox held onto 44.4%.
Twitch.TV Detecting Adblock to Block Viewers from Streaming
Unless it’s re-watching Super Bowl commercials on YouTube, viewers despise websites that show advertising. Some of us have developed banner blindness while others have downloaded Adblock to filter out ads. Although we may enjoy the content that certain websites are providing us, we know it’s also currently cutting into the pockets of websites like Twitch.TV and perhaps even browsers like Firefox in the future. Twitch.tv is figuring out how to better bypass Adblock to show ads to their viewers. Some viewers who used Adblock have received this messages like this during a live stream:
Now assuming that they are trying to force viewers not to use Adblock when watching streams, this will either draw viewers away from twitch or make viewers more tempted in purchasing Twitch’s turbo package. The turbo package is Ad-Free No pre-rolls, no mid-rolls, no companions, and no display ads.
Twitch.tv is the leading video broadcasting platform for gamers. The website attracts 45 million unique viewers per month worldwide. The Wall Street Journal showed data of the percentages of U.S. peak Internet traffic produced by companies network:
Never heard of Twitch? Surprised that it’s ranked higher than Facebook? Twitch is a video streaming service, so it will use much more bandwidth than sites like Facebook. Nonetheless, Twitch is still beating popular sites with streaming services like Hulu and Amazon. Attracting millions of users on a global scale is a challenging experience. Twitch is currently upgrading their their servers and renting servers at different locations to keep up with their global audience to deliver more reliable video streaming. This is important because Twitch.Tv viewers tend to complain about the buffering and lag when streaming videos.