@CppGuy But the ad agencies don't know that. As far as I can tell, there is very little Firefox usage in the advertising business so the ad people get their info from high-production-values sessions by Mozilla at advertising events.

Firefox users as sold to advertising decision-makers are like the old "open source community" from the 90s—a mythical set of people who love to help out big corporations with no benefit to themselves

@huronbikes Computer Shopper was a thing—if the advertising medium is designed to be a credible signal of the advertiser's intents in a market and assessment of their own product, people do pay attention (my entrance to a very deep behavioral economics research rabbit hole was: why does the same person run a web ad blocker and also pay for Computer Shopper?)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Shopper_(American_magazine)

@nblr They already know that ad blocker usage "has a positive impact on user engagement with the Web" -- but afaik haven't done a similar study for the built-in Firefox ads. https://research.mozilla.org/files/2018/04/The-Effect-of-Ad-Blocking-on-User-Engagement-with-the-Web.pdf

(The company to watch in this situation will be IBM (Red Hat). They need a browser for RHEL, but won't want to impose the costs and risks of in-browser ads and slop on corporate customers—IBM has its own "AI" to sell)