Slashdot Mirror
NYT Firefox Campaign Raises $250,000
ScytheBlade1 writes "The Firefox full-page NYT ad campaign finished off today with an impressive $250,000 over 10 days. Impressive to say the least, and it goes to show just how much momentum Firefox has."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
Not that New York is the only place on earth I'd want to advertise FireFox; I've been signing it from the mountaintops for months now and haven't looked back. Are there any further marketing plans by the Mozilla group to spread the good word? Aside: I'm a little disappointed in myself for not having remembered to contribute. Oops. Guess it's T-Shirt time ...
An individual contribution of $30 will get your name included in the ad ($10 student rate).
The problem with $250,000 is that the ad might be 99% names, and 1% content.
You can spoof the URL using onmouseover in any browser, what is the big deal?
to get /. to show correctly in firefox.
Timang tinggi tinggi
parang sudah asah
alang alang mandi
biar sampai basah
The average user thinks the IE *is* the internet.
The key point then Is to educate the user that the browser is not the internet, but just software that accesses the web. And that Firefox is better at doing that and protecting them from intrusion.
Congrats to Firefox on the $250K! This is the stuff that sends ripples through the market and makes the CEOs stop and take notice. You don't just raise a quarter million dollars in less than two weeks unless you have something seriously good, or illegal!;-) Anyone in the browser or browser add-on business is going to have to take notice of this because it is real. Browser stats from various web sites are nice, and so are download stats. But at the end of the day, money talks louder than all of that, and $250K is some pretty loud speech!
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
I still say they should've bought the ad in USA Today instead. NYT has limited average-Joe distribution. USA Today is sold in all the cheesy work cafeterias where America's IT workers take their morning coffee. It's in every 7-11 (well, those in the States anyway) where the non-IT workers take *their* morning coffee. What the blazes is a NYT ad going to do, other than waste precious money?
Don't get me wrong, I'm typing this post in Firefox right now, it's undoubtedly a great browser, but wouldn't $250 000 be better spent fighting third world poverty or providing clean drinking water?
Of course, when one compares it to the vast sums of money spent on unnecessary gas-guzzling 'SUVs' it doesn't seem so bad after all..
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
This is a good way to spend the money. Mozilla, and open source in general fail at the very first purpose of marketing: awareness. Most of the the people that could use them do not know Mozilla and Firefox even exist. If people have never even heard of your product, then obviously they won't consider using it.
The 99% name list is the content. It sends a clear message.
Ok, so ask Be, Inc. or NeXT about marketing then!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
They don't seem to care about Mozilla anymore, for some reason. It's not set to be phased out, that I know of. I went to their site to download some web advertisment buttons and all they had is FireFox Now!--no Mozilla related ones. So I e-mailed them and said I have trouble recommending FireFox at this point because it's not release quality and people I konw need the whole suite, so do they have a Mozilla button? They said no, and hoped I could recommend FireFox when it goes 1.0.
I realize they are building (or re-building) the calendar and e-mail clients seperately, but they have a completely production-worthy product right now that they don't seem to care much for.
I just don't get it.
-m
http://www.invisik.com
Apache also isn't run by Joe Average people who have a desktop from Dell or HP or Gateway. It's run by IT people who I would think are a little more into computers than Grandma down the street.
I recently installed Firefox on the home machine of an ex-coworker. Now she sort of understands things, but her daughter is the completely clueless MSN-type. So to prevent bad things from happening, I put a shortcut on her desktop to Firefox, and gave it the IE 'e'-icon.
But isn't the main drawback to Firefox at present that it isn't IE? It doesn't support a minority of sites that are IE-specific: by establishing Firefox as a serious competitor with a (say) 20% market share, web developers will be forced to code to the W3 standards and support Firefox. They can't just assume 99% IE and just ignore the few geeks that complain.
That improves the "compatibility" of Firefox without changing a line of code.
What you say sounds wonderful, but if the firefox developers asked people to donate money for such personal reasons it will surely fail. The advertisement donation was a very clear goal with immediate and concrete results (i.e., you got an add in an influential newspaper), hence the success of funding.
"Recursive bipartite matching"- try it!
bogie made the point above, "What good is all the development money in the world if nobody ever hears about your product?".
Your average user doesn't install Apache or IIS. Apache never had to break into the server market, it had a foothold at the start and grew rapidly as it matured at the same time as the market expanded. Even if someone created a new OS server it would be less of a hard sell as sys admins are a small select group who are paid to monitor these kind of developments.
If Microsoft see it as a threat... good. It may push them to fix their bloated and buggy browser. As for launching a counter-campaign against OS software... where have you been living the last couple of years? It's been in full swing for a while.
Much as a techie may want to pretend it doesn't exist, marketing is important for any product. So far it's been done by word of mouth. Raising its profile via the press, either by reviews or paid ads, it a good thing.
Finally, giving the money to the developers would be fraud. The donations were made specifically for the purpose of the ad. There is nothing to stop you doing your own fund-raising drive for the developers if you like.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Rob Davis is a marketer. He knows the importance of setting an exciting, simple, clearly-defined goal "Get a pull page ad on the NYT".
It's the kind of detail that makes the difference between "yeah, that's cool" and "I'll give some money NOW".
Open source needs more people like that. More ideas like that.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
A full page ad containing "Congrats on reaching version 1!" followed by a list of obscure names of geeks who donated will unfortunately have little or no impact with typical home users who are inexperienced or couldn't care less.
How many of these individuals can even tell you what version of the AOL InterWeb they are using now? Ask my mom which browser she uses and she'll say "MSN."
Personally, I'd rather see that money spent on an advertising campaign that communicates WHY people should use the browser in lieu of IE in very non-technical terms. Granted, 250g's won't get you much high-profile advertising, but it could still be used effectively.
Hopefully, this one ad isn't all the Spread Firefox group has planned.
zeia award
http://www.up0.com/
OK... then it's the most widely distrubuted _respected_ paper in the world :)
:)
tongue planted firmly in cheek
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
I too wanted people to use an alternative browser on our public machines at work. But at the same time I didn't want to mislead people with an IE icon pasted onto Firefox. So instead I tried making a shortcut simply called "Internet" with a generic globe icon on it. And it worked! Now nobody goes digging in the applications for IE, but I'm also not tricking anyone into thinking it is Explorer. It doesn't necessarily promote Firefox to the average user (who wouldn't know Firefox was "The Internet" without this shortcutr), but the ones who actually would be savvy enough to know the difference can still see which browser it is by looking at the title bar easily enough.
I've never seen a copy of the New York Times where I live - in England.
I've seen the International Herald Tribune and USA Today, as well as lots of British and European papers.
In terms of branding, Firefox is a much stronger name than Mozilla.
I've heard lots of non-techy people say that they have heard of this thing called Firefox. Some of them have even tried it, and are pretty impressed with what they saw.
Mention Mozilla to these same people, and they won't know what you are talking about.
There may even be a case for putting Thunderbird, Sunbird and Nvu under the Firefox brand.
My understanding is they're pushing Firefox/Thunderbird (and perhaps Sunbird eventually) because they want to move away from the complex all-in-one swiss-army knife of a browser. Firefox's UI is much more simple and streamlined than Mozilla's, so it's naturally going to be the horse they're going to back when they advertise to Joe User. The separate application approach also makes more sense in terms of development and debugging. When you have 5 different applications under one roof and bugs start cropping up, weeding problems out becomes a much more complex task.
Now from what I understand, the Mozilla suite won't be entirely phased out. if you look at the roadmap it states they will continue to update and support the Mozilla browser suite (codenamed Seamonkey). They understand they still have Mozilla customers, and they're not going to leave them out in the cold.
But in terms of attracting and maintaining a new mainstream userbase, they know Firefox is a better solution in the long run.
It's really become quite awful. Everybody was generally friendly and collegial there a while back, because it was the early adopter crowd. Now all these people, who are either the most nasty trolls I've ever seen, or just the most obnoxious human beings imaginable have ruined it. And as a result, when somebody says something like "I don't like this part of Firefox" they are likely to start a flamewar. I am saddened by this. I'm sure there's still useful discussion elsewhere, but I'm beginning to think having that "Firefox Support" link right in the toolbar is not such a great idea. I wouldn't want people to go to that forum and see the nastiness going on there and judge a fabulous browser and otherwise excellent community by it.
Dealing with TRUE mass market desktop applications is something the Open Source community is just now broaching. Several million installs of a piece of software that is probably the most commonly used thing on somebody's desktop - that's getting seriously mainstream. And mainstream means dealing with mainstream idiocy, infantile children, illiterate adults, and all the other annoying people in between. I'm not saying we shouldn't care about user friendliness, on the contrary, I'm saying that it's hard to maintain user friendliness supported by the community when the community stops being a bunch of tech-saavy hackers and starts being a bunch of idjits.
"In my opinion, this is money that should be awarded to developers, and used to further the project."
;-)
Well if it's your money, and you want it to go to developers, then you can give it to the mozilla donations page, rather than the spreadfirefox page.
But at least some small part of that $250K is my money. So you don't really get a say in how it's spent because I asked for it to be used in the newspaper advert
Personally, [less offtopic?] I find that computers without firefox on are more annoying to me than any small bugs in firefox itself are. That is, if this campaign can get firefox onto more of the computers that I occasionally have to use, that provides a bigger benefit to me than fixing "bug x" would.
I see your point, but it's not really an even comparison that you're making.
The blender fundraising campaign, as you say, was a bounty. When that bounty was raised, blender was released for the world at large under the GPL.
The Firefox campaign is about raising money to put an ad in a high-profile newspaper so that awareness will be raised as a result. It would be hard for anyone using a computer to suft the web to ignore the list of contributor names for Firefox in a full page ad for a piece of software being assembled under an NPO company!
So really, I feel it unfair to say that one is cooler than the other - the campaigns serve entirely different purposes. Blender gained its freedom, and Firefox will hopefully gain "marketshare"!