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)
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.
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!!"
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.
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.
Where did you think most of that $250K was going? :P
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
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.
Support a Europe-related section on Slashdot!
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?"
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).
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.
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.
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
They're even trying to hide from the validators:
W3 validator is 403'd
Actual results on the current front page not good
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.
You'll find that we Brits are very much a nation of newspaper lovers. Looking here you can see that although we are but a nation of a mere 55m people, we have the top three newspapers in the world in terms of circulation.
That includes beating "The Times Of India", with a potential readership of over one billion into fourth place.
The New York Times comes in 8th place, with a circulation of 1.11 million.
This sig has been deprecated.
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.