7 ms·
Kind of funny though, the vast majority of Mozilla's money comes from the ads and tracking industry, just one step removed.
by ngokevin 7y ago
Kind of funny though, the vast majority of Mozilla's money comes from the ads and tracking industry, just one step removed.
- Drdrdrq 7y agoYes, but that is just because they represent a risk for Google. Their incentives are quite different than Google's, and that is what matters.
- ChrisSD 7y agoThe irony is they tried diversifying their income. But people don't want their browser to ask for donations (that's nagging). They don't want their new tab page pre-populated with websites on a new install (even if their browsing overwrites them). They don't want "fun" additions to advertise TV shows (even if they're opt-in). But they're happy to pay via google's search and tracking. Mozilla doesn't have a lot of options open to them.
- ademup 7y agoFirefox has ~250M users as of about 9 months ago and $562M revenue for 2017. I'd honestly pay $2 per month (12 times "my share") for a Firefox that completely disavows the ad model and produces a truly user-centric experience sans ads, fingerprinting, etc. However, given that over 95% of their revenue comes from Royalties, I don't see that turning around any time soon.
- thethirdone 7y ago> Firefox has ~250M users as of about 9 months ago and $562M revenue for 2017 I think nearly everyone would be willing to pay the ~$2/year to use Firefox if all browsers weren't free. At that price, the main reason not to pay is the hassle rather than just downloading. Thanks for the context about the revenue of Firefox. I had never given it any though.
- godelski 7y agoThey have on their donations a monthly donation. That's hassle free. You can also donate to them through Amazon smile.
- Fnoord 7y ago> I think nearly everyone would be willing to pay the ~$2/year to use Firefox if all browsers weren't free. Don't forget $2 in USA buys you different things than in Russia, China, India, or Africa.
- simias 7y agoI would too, but clearly most people wouldn't, otherwise advertisement wouldn't be such a popular way to monetize apps and websites (and Google wouldn't be the behemoth that it is today). Actually I would also gladly pay for a decent search engine but even DuckDuckGo decided to monetize using ads, which IMO means that sooner or later if they're successful enough they'll become just as bad as the rest. Besides paying for a product doesn't mean that it becomes privacy-friendly, look at how Spotify still tracks your every actions even when you're a paying customer for instance.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- fencepost 7y agoA possibly relevant distinction for DDG ads is that (I believe) they're anonymized and tied only to the search, not to your identity.
- ngokevin 7y agoI think there's not much pressure to get at it when they have hundreds of millions in the bank and have been funded externally their whole life. I believe those backfired since all their marketing has been propped on morality. When they claim ads and tracking are evil, it bit them whenever they ventured anywhere near that stuff. Give many startups here an initial audience of 200M+ engaged users and they'll figure a way!
- a_imho 7y agoAre they that cash strapped? IIRC moz://a had an agreement with yahoo which they terminated just so they can sign with Google. The real irony imo of FF being considered the alternative browser, but not actually competing against Chrome where it could have a serious edge only entrenches the pro commercial anti user status quo.
- TheRealPomax 7y agoAnd? I used to work for a defense contractor, using the military complex money to instead pay for civil projects that actually benefit normal people. You can take money that comes from "I don't like this thing", and then spend it on "this benefits everyone".
- ngokevin 7y agoDoes the defense contractor rag on the military afterwards? You can take money from something, use it for good, but it's kinda funny when you start to claim the hands that feeds you is evil and bad.
- Fnoord 7y agoThis is how OpenBSD lost their DARPA funding. [1] [1] https://lwn.net/Articles/29937/ https://lwn.net/Articles/29937/
- TheRealPomax 7y agoGiven that they were a 60k employee company: yeah, some parts of them probably were.
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoIf that's truly your rationale then you're deluding yourself: you can take money, for sure, but as soon as you act to aid the source of the money then you're complicit in whatever that source is doing. You might consider the positive aspects of your use of the money out with the negative aspects of your aiding murder, say, but that's not quite what you outlined.
- TheRealPomax 7y agoAnd that's why everyone who works for Google or Facebook should quit, too, but in the real world there are an insane amount of jobs that ultimately do really bad things, and we need work. So find somewhere that your particular skillset makes a net positive contribution instead of going homeless because almost every single big company is responsible for suffering in the world. The defense contract I worked for also has a strong civil presence and makes things like turn stiles, card readers, and emergency alert systems, and those directly benefit people rather than help murder folks. The idea that "my work directly benefits the part of the company that murders people", given how budgets actually work in large companies, is arguably far more delusional here.
- derefr 7y agoWhat’s wrong with using the resources of evil (freely given, oddly enough) to destroy evil? If someone you hate offers you a billion dollars, you should take it—because in doing so you’ve made someone you hate a billion dollars poorer! It’s like stealing the money from them, with less work! Imagine, analogously: a lottery whose proceeds go to a charity supporting statistics education.
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoIf someone you hate gives you $1 million though, and says "I'll pay you again next year if you do well for me, you might even get more" then you're going to find that if you take the money in a few years all your decisions are centred around the happiness of the person you once hated. If you keep taking their money you're morally complicit in their actions too.
- derefr 7y ago> all your decisions are centred around the happiness of the person you once hated You’re essentially talking about the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect. (The government sets a bounty on snakes? Bounty hunters realize that the cheapest way to get snakes to turn in to the government, is by breeding them themselves. Now you’ve got more live snakes, not fewer.) When greed or need-for-money is an incentive (such as in a for-profit corporation), you’ll be driven to do whatever perpetuates the income stream; and, if someone is paying you to do something, it’s cheaper to just do that thing because you get to continue working with them in the future (so your marketing costs for finding new work are zero.) But, importantly, the Cobra effect doesn’t apply if your goal (as a person, or as an organization) isn’t to make money, but rather to use up money (i.e. to bankrupt your ‘patron.’) If you’re not a bounty hunter, but simply someone who hates snakes, you won’t ever bother to breed them. You’re not in it for the money. You’re in it for there being fewer cobras. There are, of course, organizations which are not for-profit corporations. Mozilla itself is a non-profit, despite there also existing a Mozilla Corporation. As well, even with a for-profit corporation, the income of such an organization can be completely divorced from how it deals with an arbitrary stream of money. Banks, for example, despite being for-profit corporations, do not spend the money you deposit with them. Your money is not an asset on their balance sheet; in fact, it’s a liability. Mozilla Corporation could, for example, just donate all the money it receives from unsavoury sources over to Mozilla-the-nonprofit, and keep none for itself. This would remove its profit motive vis. this income source. Analogies: Police confiscate stuff from criminals, and then sell that stuff at auction. They aren’t driven to confiscate as much stuff as possible, because they don’t directly see the proceeds from those auctions (it goes into the city budget, which does eventually fund them back, but in some inscrutable, non-motivating way.) Instead, the police department usually just has a mandate to take the stuff and sell it. (There is a broken incentive around police confiscation of drugs and cash, because these are so hard to trace that police can and do directly profit from these confiscations. But money wired between corporations as a result of an invoice is not untraceable like cash, so the confiscation of cash isn’t really analogous. A closer analogy is the confiscation of pimped-out cars—the police do not, and cannot, make personal use of these. So they don’t really care how many they find.) Oil-and-gas engineers aren’t driven to flare as much natural gas out of oil fields as possible, because there’s no useful purpose to flaring natural gas (for now); they’re just trying to use it up and get it out of the way of the stuff they do want. Building renovation contractors aren’t driven to collect as much asbestos as possible. They only collect and remove it because they can’t certify the building until it’s all gone. (Imagine an alternative world where you could turn in asbestos to the government for a reward. We’d get a Cobra effect so fast.) In all these cases, you’re not driven by your need to collect the thing; and there’s no element of greed driving you to collect the thing; it’s just part of your job to collect the thing. As you diminish the number of illegal weapons out there, or amount of natural gas in the oil field, or the amount of asbestos left in buildings... you can simply do less sequestering. Nobody is put out when criminals run out of guns, not even the police. The oil-and-gas engineers who did the burn-offs are done their work at that oil field, sure, but they just move on to another oil field. The renovators have plenty of other jobs to do, and the people who specifically handle asbestos removal will just retrain to remove the next thing people want gone from buildings, toxic mould or what-have-you. —— What we’re essentially talking about, here, is a ‘parasitic’ nonprofit—the organizational equivalent of a mosquito, something that wanders around sucking its ‘hosts’ dry, but which doesn’t expect (or attempt) to subsist indefinitely on a single ‘host’. It expects to either kill its host; be killed by its host; or be “swatted away” by its host, at which point it can find a new host. And, because a parasitic organization serves no useful purpose to its host—it offers no attempt at symbiosis—the host will eventually become aware of its nature, though how fast this happens can vary dramatically, depending on how bureaucratic the host is, and the time-scale of the deal the host and parasite originally made. (Imagine how long it would take the US government to figure out that a weapons subcontractor is a foreign-government led operation with the aim of “siphoning money out of the US defense budget while avoiding actually satisfying the demand for a given weapon”, purely through the regular business-side interactions between the government and the contractor, without the assistance of the government’s background-checking process. Unlike governments, private companies do not generally do background checks on their contractors’ employees, so an IBM, or a GE, is not safe from this attack.) Of course, unlike in the animal realm where every animal at some point deals with a parasite from a state of complete ignorance, parasitic organizations can get reputations that precede them everywhere. This is what I’d call the host “killing” the parasite nonprofit. But, well, the same people can form as many organizations as they want... and perhaps even use successive organizational vehicles to drain the same host companies repeatedly, if they just ensure to put a different face (different figurehead CEOs, etc.) on the parasite each time. These are the same proven strategies that “fake” charities use every day to line their own pockets! Just turned to a purpose other than selfishness.
- BlueTemplar 7y agoWell, we could change that. I've subscribed for a monthly donation to Mozilla after learning about that. I've also been giving through Flattr as an alternative to ads for micro-funding on the Web - anyone knows why their plugin/extension/addon isn't listed on addons.mozilla.org anymore ? (You can still install it from their official website.) Might it be due to a conflict of interest between Google and Eyeo ?