Unfortunately, there was a fair amount of misreporting over the weekend in response to Johnathan Nightingale's blog post here: https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2014/05/09/new-tab-e...

The point of the post is that Mozilla is going ahead with experiments like Directory Tiles, but that no money will change hands during testing and development of those experiments. The commitment is that Mozilla will only move forward with seeking revenue if the experiments actually demonstrate added value for users, and that any revenue is collected in a way consistent with the Manifesto.

That is incorrect. See "New Tab Experiments" just for days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7725324

That was a misinterpretation of Jonathan's blog post.