Content Services Overview

The Content Services Team was formed in late 2013 to explore opportunities that will provide additional value to our users, strongly align with our mission, and over time, generate new sources of diversified revenue.

The team works to make the web economically and socially sustainable. We want to sustain it economically, to ensure that the Web remains a place of economic opportunity for content creators. And we wish to make is socially sustainable, meaning that we wish to address the "maladies" that the advertising-supported content ecosystem has engendered on the Web, including:

• poor user experience
• widespread use of proprietary technology on the Web
• ad fraud
• lack of user control over data resulting in a loss of privacy

Our current mission is to provide in-browser promoted content experiences for advertisers who want better, higher-quality relationships with their audience and who choose Mozilla Content Services in order to have a future-facing, ethical partner with scale.

Product Guidelines

To achieve our mission, we build products that rely on users trusting Mozilla including code that is in Firefox and add-ons as well as our services. We want to earn trust by being transparent with our policies, processes, and open source code. While not a strict requirement for releasing a new product, we will try to build trust into code so that users do not have to rely on Mozilla services operating according to policy. If our services need to collect data, we intend to only use the minimal amount of data necessary to answer specific questions, and we will document the behaviors and communicate to users/community that this is happening. We will also build controls into the products to provide better user choice as well as an easy mechanism to turn things off.

Product Roadmaps

Directory Tiles

Every time a user opens up a new tab in Firefox, the browser displays Tiles. Frequent Firefox users see screenshots of the websites they visit most often in their Tiles. We look to leverage the Tiles on our New Tab pages and make them a source of revenue for Mozilla. There are a few opportunities that we began tests in market (first in pre-release channels) in 2014 and the first of which is to provide sponsored content on First-Run-Tiles known as Directory Tiles. This began testing in 2014 Q2/3. The successes here led to work on additional Tile enhancements outside of First-Run.

Suggested Tiles

For existing users with browsing history, we want to provide users valuable content of new places to visit. We provide Firefox with additional data that it uses to decide if a suggestion should be made on the New Tab page. For example, if a user tends to visit web development sites, we can make a suggestion to visit "Mozilla Developer Network."

UP/Intent Engine

UP is our Intent Engine for across Mozilla that helps us deliver personalization platforms for all of our products and services. Our 2014 strategy is to keep building our UP platform to make it available to the desktop, OS, services, and other products and have the bridges built this year that each product team has the ability to read/write to it. We will do limited tests in Q2/3/4 of this year to test different Intent Engine modules (such as tasks, discovery, personalization, ads). Within UP, we have a particular focus around Intentcasting and VRM.

Content Services Resources

Doc Searls' Intention Economy Book.

Check out our Official Content Services Blog.

Join our Interest mailing list ContentServices Distro

Reach out on email to the Content Services Team

Find us on IRC #mozcontent