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by dotBen 5345 days ago
Actually, it is true.

I'm not sure the exact history of it all, but I know that at a State of the Word presentation at a WordCamp many years ago, Matt M said that they were serving ads to Internet Explorer users to try to convince them to switch.
2 comments
n2linux 5345 days ago
<disclaimer>I am an Automattic employee.</disclaimer>

We do serve ads equally to all browser types. :)

[edited to note that I am talking about ads that can potentially generate revenue, not any other ads we may have run in the past to convince people to upgrade their browsers]

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Chris_Newton 5345 days ago
> We do serve ads equally to all browser types. :)

Contrary to what it said on your site when we signed up, it appears that you also serve very much non-text ads these days as well. We discovered this when someone sent us a screenshot of a (large, bright white) ad for a vaguely related product displayed right underneath a (medium-sized, dark-background) screenshot of our new product on our custom-styled (dark coloured) blog.

This was on a blog for which we have paid actual money for various premium features, and to say that we were unimpressed at how unprofessional-looking this made our post would be an understatement. I was really hoping that this was some sort of dubiousware installed on the visitor in question's browser and not something done by the WP site, but I notice that the explanation about ads on your site has since changed to remove the "text" qualifier, though it certainly hadn't at the time the offending ad was displayed or when we chose to use your service and pay you money for the extra features.

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dotBen 5345 days ago
Must have been a policy change, it used to be IE only..

http://garry.posterous.com/matt-mullenweg-and-toni-schnei

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thmzlt 5345 days ago
It sounds like an effective way to force users to update/upgrade their software.
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powertower 5345 days ago
It's much more likely that their Firefox user-base had extremely low click-throughs on ads, so they turned it off for them, and in turn increased the overall click-through numbers ... which can influence how much they get per click.
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