Ethical Ads
FileZilla, the free FTP solution, is an open source suite distributed for free. To support the development of FileZilla suite and all associated community effort, we have to rely on advertising revenues. As web users and developers we are concerned with how the advertising industry manage users' privacy nowadays, though. We have been thinking of an advertising model that is respectful of people will and desires, and we find out that we were not alone trying to pursue this goal, and we found Read the Doc's Ethical Ads.
The idea behind Ethical Ads is to provide value to all constituencies: users, customers and advertisers. In order to achieve a similar goal, we identified some basic principles and linked them to the different spots where we do display third parties ads and offers.
- Know and respect existing laws;
- Respect users' Confidentiality;
- Rely on an advertising model that is up to the best industry standards.
- Advertise only premium brands and complementary products or services.
- When feasible favor the promotion of products or services that enhance our offer.
In order to achieve the above mentioned principles, we do the following:
Legal. Our team understand the importance of getting legal advice on the continuously changing legal landscape. This includes making sure we provide the right and appropriate disclaimers on how we operate the site and distribute our software, as well as making sure our brand is respected to avoid any possible confusion or harm.
Users' confidentiality. In order to protect users' confidentiality our site does not track users' behavior, hence we do not sell your data. More importantly all displayed ads are hosted at our site and do NOT use third parties' scripts, cookies or pixels.
Compliance with Clean Software Alliance's guidelines. We distribute binaries for few platforms, and they may come with third parties' offers. As members of the Clean Software Alliance - a self-regulatory organization for software distribution and monetization that brings together Google, Microsoft, many Anti-Virus platforms and few Publishers - we abide in full its guidelines (require registration). By adhering to these standards we do our best to make sure users are given clear information, can opt out trivially and if they decide to accept an offer can always easily revert their decision. Some of our products' installers may contain third parties' scripts, where that happens we do require your explicit consent before, though. While we do our best to choose products or services that are premium offers from well-known and reputable brands, we always welcome feedback and suggestions.
Our worldview on online advertising
We're doing our best to sustain an advertising model we want to exist:
- We don't track you
- We don't sell your data
- We either promote our own products or complimentary products and services
- We host everything ourselves, no third-party scripts or images in our web ads
Our model isn't too different from what advertising looked like until the internet: people was just reading a newspaper, listening to the radio or watching tv, and advertisers were just paying to be displayed, mentioned or showed over these media.
We do not much like how ad tech has been built over time, tracking users, following them across the web, from site to site, showing the same ads and gathering data about their actions and interests. In order to avoid these classic web advertising pitfalls we decided to:
- Not collect any personal information about you.
- Not build a profile of your personality to sell ads against.
- Count only accumulated impressions and clicks, without any reference to individuals.
- Show ads of products and services that we believe may be of interest to FileZilla users.
We run the ads we want to have on our site, in a way that makes us feel good.
Advertising on FileZilla
You can connect with millions of developers, webmasters, gamers and photographers and more broadly people who need to move either few large files or many files. Your product or service could be the solution they are looking for. By putting your advertisement in front of our audience, you can connect to an interesting target market and achieve your business goals.
If you want to advertise on FileZilla please send us an email at advertising@filezilla-project.org, our team will reach out to you with more information and help you to get started promoting your product or brand to over 4 million unique visitors and ensure you reach your advertising goals.
Feedback
We're a free and open source project and we value your feedback. If you ever want to reach out about this effort, feel free to write us at advertising@filezilla-project.org