Fuddland

There’s major geek excitement buzzing around the internet at the moment, due to the Spread Firefox campaign. The deal is, the Mozilla Foundation want its users to contribute at least 30 USD to fund a full-page advertisement in the New York Times, promoting the browser. In return, the user gets their name printed in the ad.

Now call me an old cynic if you will, but this seems like a fairly lame way to spend users’ money. Think about it: which would you prefer? To give a company $30 and have them put it into research, development, or wherever they saw fit in order to improve their product, or would you like to give a company money and be guaranteed that they’re going to spend it on nothing but advertising. Sure advertising is important, but to allocate all of a users’ contribution to that cause isn’t a good use of their donation.

It’s actually quite a cunning ploy by the Mozilla Foundation: they’re playing on the “Me too!” phenomenon that we saw with Gmail accounts. A wave spreads over a certain proportion of the internet-savvy users out there, a virtual murmuring of “Hey, I’ve contributed to the Spread Firefox thing, have you? Oh you should, you get your name in print and everything.” Big deal. If anything’s going to make me ignore a full-page ad, it’s squillions of lines of tiny print. And contributors who also encourage ten others to donate get the utterly meaningless status of “Community Champion”. To quote Tim from The Office:

It’s a title someone’s given you to get you to do something they don’t want to do for free — it’s like making the div kid at school milk monitor.

Oh wait, they do get a t-shirt. Woop-de-do. But the ad isn’t actually the thing: the wave is the thing. The campaign gets reported in a few places, and suddenly almost everyone knows about Firefox, with word-of-mouth taking care of the rest. The wave cost nothing and reached far more potential users than a newspaper ad could ever hope to. Savvy.

If we ignore the cynicism above and assume that they genuinely wanted to take out this ad to reach [only] the readers of the New York Times and convince them to switch to Firefox, then there’s another aspect to this whole business: can we still consider Firefox to be “free” if it makes these kind of requests? I realise anyone can download it and use its full capabilities without paying a penny, but that’s not the whole deal, for me. There’s no disputing that a dedicated team of programmers put together a very good browser without ever charging for their time or effort. That’s not the path they wanted to go down, fair enough. But then they realised that, if they actually want to promote their product, some cash might be quite a handy thing to have. The idea of asking for contributions to an advertising campaign struck; this is somehow more palatable for a user to swallow than asking for an outright payment for using the product at all [recall the outcry when Six Apart moved from one business model to the other — Mozilla aren’t going to make the same mistake]. It’s almost a form of emotional blackmail: “we won’t charge you, but if you really love us you’ll send us some money”. And of course, if you’ve already contributed to the ad campaign, you can always make a general donation — especially if you’d like your money to go towards improving the product and not just telling a relatively small potential user-base which “free” browser you’re a fan of.

#1

Gordon | 2004 / 10 / 25 – 13:52

Kinda agree with you on this one. As a forum administrator for HaloScan (my tiny bit of putting something ‘back’ into the web), I know that some people DO want to help out just to help others, but all this paying to get your name in the NY Times?? Hell I got my name in an O’Reilly book for nowt other than a piece of sage advice (which wasn’t even original).

What price fame eh?

Commenting on this post is closed. Thanks to all those who left comments. If you'd still like to say something about this entry, feel free to email me.