Disclaimer: it will soon be 10 years I contribute to MDN, esp. localizing its content in French. What follows is my opinion only and does not constitute a statement for the MDN l10n-fr community.
This content is also hosted on https://gist.github.com/SphinxKnight/f8d86b6bdc2910719ba3b1476ac09910
There has been 0 announcements to the public nor to the community. Here is the 8th principle of the Mozilla Manifesto for anyone interested to read: "Transparent community-based processes promote participation, accountability and trust."
I have since seen several messages from my end (without actively looking for them) "was there a blog post or an annoucement?".
mdn/yari#8213 has no rationale nor explanation. In my mind "open source" is more than just "share source code on GitHub and deal with it". It would be nice for yari to be exemplary in terms of intent/transparency in order to build trust.
A few weeks ago (and before ads inclusion), a roadmap with OWD was advertised: no mention of ads in the blog post nor in the tracking GH view. On the other hand, this roadmap is advertised right from https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/advertising. Is this roadmap a means to an end (generating revenue) or the contrary?
To balance this, I strongly hope there will be a report at the end of the six weeks of this "experiment" (29th of March) and that any continuation will not be made in silence by default.
On https://www.kevel.com/, we can read on the front page "Bypass ad blockers with ad server APIs" which, to me, does not align with "user respect".
On the other hand, neither Wikipedia nor OpenStreetMap have ads while those noble projects:
- Share some foundational ideas with MDN (open knowledge/contribution, etc.).
- have apparently less financial resources than MoCo
Mozilla also has another "common" project that I know of: Common Voice. As far as I understand, this project is lead by Mozilla Foundation (whereas MDN is lead by Mozilla Corporation): would/should/could MDN switch to MoFo governance?
Contrary to previous MDN Plus features, this "feature" affects every reader on MDN. For other features, it was sensible for Mozilla to collect the corresponding revenue as they were the sole creators and maintainers of MDN Plus. Since ads affect every single page (whether English or localized, whether written by a MoCo employee, an OWD member, or a volunteer): what is the plan to distribute the revenue generated by the ads among the diverse community writing them?
For instance, in the past, 40% of MDN traffic was generated from non-English content. Does that mean that Mozilla will "invest" 40% (minus a margin for hosting/managing the platform) of ads revenue to maintaining localization tooling/communities for MDN?
A similar question could be asked about the OWD "share".
I have no statistics regarding the developer population, but I would tend to think that, as most of them are tech-savvy, they have an ad blocker installed (this question could have been asked beforehand on Matrix/Discord). If I understand it correctly: blocking the ads would block the revenue.
Moreover:
- Mozilla recommends using µBlock Origin and this is the most used extension for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?promoted=recommended&sort=users&type=extension (see also https://blog.mozilla.org/en/uncategorized/online-advertising-strategies/)
- https://github.com/easylist/easylist/commit/f02f2264cdc4122c1af971519cd640931d1121ef MDN ads were added to the easylist less than 36h after mdn/yari#8213 was merged, meaning most of µBlock origin users with default settings (myself included) will never see an ad. This heavily "reduces" the value one can get from an MDN Plus subscription if the intent is not to receive ads.
In regards to all of this, I would not bet that much on ads and do not quite understand Mozilla strategy here. I hope MDN Plus is sustainable at least for the resources Mozilla put in its development.
I can't help but ask those bleak questions.
- What if this does not bring "enough" (to be defined) revenue? What would Mozilla do?
- Corollary: the recent addition of ads could indicate the existing revenue flow from MDN Plus was previously not sufficient regarding MoCo objectives.
- Does Mozilla intend to let OWD "run" MDN in the near future?
- Does Mozilla intend to "donate" the project to another foundation?
- Aside: it seems like the Open Collective "economic model" is pretty helpful for commons, maybe the OWD team (or OC) would have some interesting feedback about sustaining a common like MDN and its platform.
- What does Mozilla think of alternative/forks for providing content under CC-BY-SA 2.5?
See https://github.com/orgs/mdn/discussions/335