Experimenting with advertising on MDN 

MDN has been a valuable resource for web developers since 2005, consistently supported and improved by Mozilla and its community. With over 17 million unique monthly users, it is widely used and also integrated into other solutions.

Starting February 15th and for the next six weeks, we will experiment with partnerships and contextual advertising on MDN in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and selected European countries.

We believe this addition will make MDN even more resilient and capable of offering free and accessible resources to developers around the world.

We have a newly created, publicly available roadmap, developed in collaboration with our partners from W3C, Microsoft, Google, and Open Web Docs. You are welcome to check it out here.

Our commitment to user privacy and data protection remains a top priority, and we stand by Mozilla's Ad targeting guidelines. MDN's ads will be strictly context-based and will not include tracking pixels or personal data sharing.

For this experiment, we will work with carefully chosen and vetted advertisers who align with our vision for web development and we will display at most one static ad per page. MDN Plus subscribers will have the option to turn off ads through their account settings.

Advertisers rely on attribution to measure the effectiveness of their advertising campaigns. Attribution provides metrics that give advertisers insights into their campaign performance, while also helping publishers understand their role in supporting advertisers. Despite its significance, current attribution methods have many privacy concerns.

In line with Mozilla's vision of protecting user privacy and personal data, over the past year, Mozilla has been a part of a working group developing a new proposal called Interoperable Private Attribution (IPA) to enable attribution while maintaining strong privacy protection. IPA provides advertisers with the ability to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns while ensuring user privacy. You can find additional information on the topic in this blogpost. Mozilla’s and MDN’s goal is to advance the Interoperable Private Attribution work in the months to come.

We are working with advertising partners who are supportive of our privacy goals. For now, that means working without attribution. Our eventual goal is to enable attribution without tracking, which will improve the quality and value of the ads we show.

We have a GitHub discussion forum that is thriving, many of our active community members are there, and we invite you to reach out with feedback and questions.

We remain committed to building a better open web and improving our users' experiences. We believe in the power of information and the importance of an accessible and trustworthy source of it. Thank you for being a part of this journey and we encourage you to stay tuned for what's to come. We are excited to continue working towards a better future together.

Interested to be part of this journey? Check out our Advertise with us page and get in contact with us.