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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."
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And congrats and not being vulnerable to the latest IT URL spoofing flaw. That one's so easy even a kid can do it.
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 ...
But the NYT site uses popups! Won't Firefox block 'em? ;)
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
""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.""
Or just how badly we want to get rid of IE.
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.
On the guy that came up with the idea, Rob Davis.
Anyone interest in a similar campaign for Mozilla? I'll donate FeedTheLizard.com and FeedTheLizard.org to the cause.
That kind of money could be better used to finance developement.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
A mention of the spreadfirefox website on popular website slashdot.org brought new woes to the spreadfirefox team:
;)
"We completely went over our bandwidth for this month, and I was just served with a bill over $250'000 for this month's bandwidth usage!!"
to get /. to show correctly in firefox.
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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.
Mozilla is dead...Long live Mozilla.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Notice that they were preparing for about 2,500 donors in 10 days at first. And at the end of the 10th day we have a donors from over 80 countries. Quite amazing.
A full-page ad in the NYT costs between $75k and $120k, depending on the page, and when it will be shown. The Firefox team have not chosen a particular day for the ad, but rather a time-window of ~10 days in which it will be shown once. This is cheaper.
I don't know where the rest of the money will go now. There are tentative plans, however, to raise similar campains in other countries if the ad proves to be a success. Maybe some of the excess money can be used for that.
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If you don't remember, the original campaign was for 2500 people in 10 days (so we'll assume they'd raise about a quarter of the money ~$62,500) and even then they said not all of the money would go to the ad but to fund additional publicity for the launch. If we assume the ad costs the same, you see they probably have $200,000+ for other publicity... or a big slush fund.
http://www.nytadvertising.com/was/displayads/pages /contentDisplayAds/0,1024,,00.html?l1Id=6&l2Id=115 0/
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I see it among non tech-savy people. I have friends coming and asking me if i've tried it; in the cybercafe i work it's installed on every PC and something like 7 out of 10 clients choose it over IE.
I'm very happy to see this. I still like Opera better, but Firefox is a terrific browser. And the price is right.
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 was surfing in the net. And then, like, bleep bleep bleep bleep bleep! And then, like, half of the web page was gone. And I was, like, Huh?"
The New York Times is probably the most widely distributed newspaper in the world!
It's not just advertising in New York, Jeez!
Kids these days!
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
Actually, I'll expand on that...
Having the status-bar and the link-target disagree is a non-event (and has been ever since 99% of people enabled javascript in their browser.)
A major event would be where the address bar and dislayed-url differ. That is not the case here.
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?
Acocording to this article, the advert costs only $50,000. We already know that The Mozilla Foundation are getting discounts because of the time window, and also because of their non-profit status.
The 99% name list is the content. It sends a clear message.
to get slashdot to be standards compliant.
Yeah, just yesterday my sister asked me why I don't have the internet on my computer I replied to her by blatantly asking, "What the fuck are you talking about?" Of course her reply was where did that Internet Explorer icon go. Just to show you how IE is dominating the damn browser market, people don't even know there is other software that can be used to visit websites (other than AOL users).
In my opinion, this is money that should be awarded to developers, and used to further the project. I'm glad that people love firefox so much, but did apache ever buy an ad in the NYT? Apache is the most popular web server in the world by all estimates. They never had to launch a massive media campaign, because they were simply the best product. That's the way firefox should be.
Also, Microsoft is going to see this as a direct threat. They have far more access to media (MSNBC anyone?) than mozilla ever will. If they were to launch a counter-campaign, which is exactly what they're being baited into to doing, they could scare a lot of people away from firefox, and all open source projects.
The money should be given to the developers who go relativly un-rewarded, and to foster the development of mozilla.
NO! They do not want any more money. Such actions will be discouraged. HA!
Standing at the very edge of my imagination, I peered into the inky void and realised -- I couldn't think up a new sig.
Why bother spending on cancer care: we could save thousands of lives in the third world with the money for one cancer ward. Why bother caring for the disabled: we could save thousands of lives in the third world with the money for one disabled access scheme. Why bother campaigning against a road through a nature reserve: we could save thousands of lives in the third world with the money.
The point is, you can reduce virtually any expenditure to "could be better spent saving lives in the third world". That doesn't mean that the other causes are any less worthwhile.
Many people believe that the current state of the web is harmful to society, and will donate money to help establish a competitor to Microsoft's domination of the market. If they want to donate money to that cause, that's their choice. They could have given the money to Oxfam, but chose not to.
Right... I hate when people do this. "Shouldn't we do that instead of that. To feed the hungry, to save the earth."
Let me ask you one thing - when you voted did you think of the starving? When you bought your computer did you looked a the performance price ration or to the power used/performance/your needs/price?
Do you care about the water you waste? Or is the price that makes you think about it? Do your job as best as you can and you'll save the earth.
The earth will be fine... so start acting if you want a part in that, tell the others how to save the earth, show them how.
Feed the hungry - damn it, it sound like the criptocomunists and power hungry from my contry trying to get reelected. And not having any other argument other then the "moral" one.
This is a kind of argument that makes my skin crawl, because we are educated to "act" acording to the moral, and not to act moral. The key word being acting.
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.
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Oh, sure, Microsoft could (under a suitably bizarre set of circumstances) devote a full-page ad to promotion / defense / apology of Internet Explorer, but basically don't have much reason to. (In short, it's not a money maker.)
... and just like the local public broadcasting station, it seems like MS doesn't like to get just one donation.
However, that's not what I mean: what I'm saying is that Microsoft's users ("customers") and developers ("employees") don't love IE. They're not going to donate money to an advertising fund for IE simply because they think it's so good that everyone with a computer ought to at least consider it.
Now, you could say that Microsoft's customers are donating money, in part, to an advertising fund for MS and getting some "free gifts" in appreciation -- like spyware, viruses, Internet explorer
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
...I don't see Firefox making any large-scale penetration onto the corporate networks unless you can manage it with Group Policies.