156 ms·

Mozilla revenue 2021 increases 20%

165 points by illiac786 4y ago

piratepixel 4y ago
Mitchell Baker's aka the Mozilla CEO's salary has doubled in 2021 according to that report. It was $2.7M in 2020, now it's $5.6M in 2021. With FF marketshare keeps dropping, idk what the hell Mozilla is doing anymore.
djbusby 4y ago
Did I read that right? 1B in assets? Mozilla is a unicorn? Edit: and 43M less on software engineering.
- e63f67dd-065b 4y ago
  Not just a unicorn, since they actually have 1B in assets. Most unicorns can't even claim a tenth of that in revenue. They have 600M in revenue and 340M in expenses, and their cash flow looks strong.
  - azinman2 4y ago
    Yet didn’t they lay off a lot of their next gen rendering platform team? Hmmm
    - PartiallyTyped 4y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24128865 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24128865 They did lay off Servo and a Security team not too long ago.
none_to_remain 4y ago
Crossing my fingers while I read this lest my soul be consumed also
opendomain 4y ago
what was the driver of this growth?
- artificial 4y ago
  crosses fingers Hopefully people escaping Chrome monoculture and users fleeing the looming ad blocking nerfing. Mozilla seems to fit the user agent role better.
- virgildotcodes 4y ago
  Manifest v3 is the only thing I can think of that spawned a lot of “I’m switching to Firefox” online conversations over the last year. But that’s in the nerdiest, most niche programming circles, so I can’t believe its impact is actually measurable.
  - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    and yet, Firefox is switching to Manifest v3, too, just on a more delayed timeline than Chrome.
    - dblohm7 4y ago
      They're not getting rid of the old blocking API, though.
      - deafpolygon 4y ago
        Yet. When Google makes it contingent on their annual "donation", they will.
        kaba0 4y ago
        That donation may well be just as important for google than it is to mozilla. They are much better off without a huge lawsuit and paying out “pennies” each year.
therusskiy 4y ago
I want to love Mozilla and Firefox as it promotes diversity and standards for the web, but god do I hate Mozilla's marketing. It's completely outrage driven and feeds on fearmongering: "google bad, we good, give us money". Having spoken to people who work at Mozilla they say the management is pretty toxic which makes me think they are being hypocrites with their message.
- e63f67dd-065b 4y ago
  7.4M out of their 600M revenue is from contributions. I don't really see them soliciting donations either, so really they could have 0 donations starting tomorrow and be perfectly fine.
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  Some of the stuff on their blog feed is just very negative. Like why would you write a blog post about how to delete an account from another service? Just seems petty and vindictive and not really any of your business. Why do it? https://blog.mozilla.org/en/internet-culture/how-to-delete-spotify/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/internet-culture/how-to-delete-s... Then they have an apparent advert for Disney? https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/disney-and-pixars-turning-red-movie-browser-mobile-wallpapers/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/disney-and-pixars-turni... Remember when they forced an a creepy advert for some random TV show into everyone's browsers? It's all just a big unhinged.
  - dont__panic 4y ago
    Curiously, I actually like their reasoning behind the blog post: > With our lives so online, our digital space can get messy with inactive and unnecessary accounts — and forgetting about them can pose a security risk. This is a good message about web hygiene. It does feel a bit negative, though, you're right. I wish they'd focus on more balance between "big tech bad" and "try this cool open source alternative" because there are SO many cool projects out there to help you manage a music library, or personal streaming, etc.
- bogomipz 4y ago
  >"It's completely outrage driven and feeds on fearmongering: "google bad, we good, give us money"." Indeed and yet they don't have any problem taking hundreds of millions of dollars from Google in exchange for letting Google be their default search engine.[1] Talk about cognitive dissonance. [1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/14/mozilla_google_search/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/14/mozilla_google_search...
tomcam 4y ago
I vote they spend some of it on a drop-in HTML/CSS/JavaScript rendering lib
mradek 4y ago
Been using Firefox since I switched to Debian full time for my Linux box and backend development. Really happy 4 them.
CyanBird 4y ago
I love our fox-people Wishing them the best, always :)!
e63f67dd-065b 4y ago
530M out of 600M of their revenue is from royalties, so from a certain perspective Mozilla's primary business is actually serving Google to FF users :/ They spend 111M out of 340M on managerial overhead, or about a third. This is on the higher side, but not too much out of line with the general industry (not saying that it's a good thing, but that's how the world works). I have to wonder though, how much of that money is actually spent on Firefox? 530M in royalties, how much is that per FF user?
- walrus01 4y ago
  It's a sad state of the large, useful search engine industry that they're faced with a lesser-of-two-evils choice for default search engine (thus driving royalties), between Google or Bing. Unless anybody is smoking something really strong and suggests something like baidu search or yandex search.
- chomp 4y ago
  There's a line item that suggests approximately 200 million goes to the software development program (which is the Foundation, MZLA, and Mozilla Corp combined), but I can't tell how much is spent on Firefox itself.
gamjQZnHT53AMa 4y ago
Threads about the finances of Mozilla are always full of criticism and begrudging. Yeah, they take money from Google, and that keeps them alive. Yeah, they would love to not be so reliant on them. This is old news. But while they are alive, and while Firefox continues development, Google have slightly less of a grip on the internet. That is undeniably a good thing. Mozilla getting paid by Google is a better scenario than Firefox being abandoned and Google controlling the browser engine space entirely.
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  Almost nobody uses Firefox - it's Safari that keeps balance in the browser world.
  - ianbutler 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers To be fair, you are correct in the mobile space, and that is now the lion share of devices, but Firefox does have a healthy 7.5% usage in the desktop space if the metrics on this page are to be believed.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - tpush 4y ago
      Why not just look at market share across all devices? Which makes chrisseaton's point: Firefox sits at 3.26% as opposed to Safari at 18.61%.
      - ianbutler 4y ago
        Because mobile and desktop are different markets
      - heavyset_go 4y ago
        Because all browsers are Safari on the mobile platform that has 60% of market share in the US.
open592 4y ago
AntiRemoteWork 4y ago
sciurus 4y ago
There's some analysis of this and an interview with Mozilla's CEO at https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/17/mozilla-looks-to-its-next-chapter/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/17/mozilla-looks-to-its-next-...
pmarreck 4y ago
Not sure if anyone from Mozilla is here to comment, but now that Google has decided to abandon support for the otherwise-promising JPEG-XL standard in Chrome, will Firefox press on with support for it?
pmarreck 4y ago
Firefox is a fantastic browser. Switched to it from Chrome about a year or 2 ago and haven't looked back. I run Nightly and it's the only browser installed on my main dev machine, a NixOS behemoth from System76 (Thelio Major).
sorwin 4y ago
I get that Mozilla is far more than just Firefox, but what are they actually spending so much money on? They have 750 employees, yet Firefox (their main product) barely sees any impactful updates. Either there is a lot of bloat, money mismanagement, or just bad leadership (which covers the previous).
footlose_3815 4y ago
[dead]
Ptchd 4y ago
What is the source of this increase of revenue?

165 points by illiac786 4y ago

Mitchell Baker's aka the Mozilla CEO's salary has doubled in 2021 according to that report. It was $2.7M in 2020, now it's $5.6M in 2021. With FF marketshare keeps dropping, idk what the hell Mozilla is doing anymore.

djbusby 4y ago

Did I read that right? 1B in assets? Mozilla is a unicorn? Edit: and 43M less on software engineering.

e63f67dd-065b 4y ago
Not just a unicorn, since they actually have 1B in assets. Most unicorns can't even claim a tenth of that in revenue. They have 600M in revenue and 340M in expenses, and their cash flow looks strong.
- azinman2 4y ago
  Yet didn’t they lay off a lot of their next gen rendering platform team? Hmmm
  - PartiallyTyped 4y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24128865 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24128865 They did lay off Servo and a Security team not too long ago.

none_to_remain 4y ago

Crossing my fingers while I read this lest my soul be consumed also

opendomain 4y ago

what was the driver of this growth?

artificial 4y ago
crosses fingers Hopefully people escaping Chrome monoculture and users fleeing the looming ad blocking nerfing. Mozilla seems to fit the user agent role better.
virgildotcodes 4y ago
Manifest v3 is the only thing I can think of that spawned a lot of “I’m switching to Firefox” online conversations over the last year. But that’s in the nerdiest, most niche programming circles, so I can’t believe its impact is actually measurable.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  and yet, Firefox is switching to Manifest v3, too, just on a more delayed timeline than Chrome.
  - dblohm7 4y ago
    They're not getting rid of the old blocking API, though.
    - deafpolygon 4y ago
      Yet. When Google makes it contingent on their annual "donation", they will.
      - kaba0 4y ago
        That donation may well be just as important for google than it is to mozilla. They are much better off without a huge lawsuit and paying out “pennies” each year.

therusskiy 4y ago

I want to love Mozilla and Firefox as it promotes diversity and standards for the web, but god do I hate Mozilla's marketing. It's completely outrage driven and feeds on fearmongering: "google bad, we good, give us money". Having spoken to people who work at Mozilla they say the management is pretty toxic which makes me think they are being hypocrites with their message.

e63f67dd-065b 4y ago
7.4M out of their 600M revenue is from contributions. I don't really see them soliciting donations either, so really they could have 0 donations starting tomorrow and be perfectly fine.
chrisseaton 4y ago
Some of the stuff on their blog feed is just very negative. Like why would you write a blog post about how to delete an account from another service? Just seems petty and vindictive and not really any of your business. Why do it? https://blog.mozilla.org/en/internet-culture/how-to-delete-spotify/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/internet-culture/how-to-delete-s... Then they have an apparent advert for Disney? https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/disney-and-pixars-turning-red-movie-browser-mobile-wallpapers/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/disney-and-pixars-turni... Remember when they forced an a creepy advert for some random TV show into everyone's browsers? It's all just a big unhinged.
- dont__panic 4y ago
  Curiously, I actually like their reasoning behind the blog post: > With our lives so online, our digital space can get messy with inactive and unnecessary accounts — and forgetting about them can pose a security risk. This is a good message about web hygiene. It does feel a bit negative, though, you're right. I wish they'd focus on more balance between "big tech bad" and "try this cool open source alternative" because there are SO many cool projects out there to help you manage a music library, or personal streaming, etc.
bogomipz 4y ago
>"It's completely outrage driven and feeds on fearmongering: "google bad, we good, give us money"." Indeed and yet they don't have any problem taking hundreds of millions of dollars from Google in exchange for letting Google be their default search engine.[1] Talk about cognitive dissonance. [1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/14/mozilla_google_search/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/14/mozilla_google_search...

tomcam 4y ago

I vote they spend some of it on a drop-in HTML/CSS/JavaScript rendering lib

mradek 4y ago

Been using Firefox since I switched to Debian full time for my Linux box and backend development. Really happy 4 them.

CyanBird 4y ago

I love our fox-people Wishing them the best, always :)!

e63f67dd-065b 4y ago

530M out of 600M of their revenue is from royalties, so from a certain perspective Mozilla's primary business is actually serving Google to FF users :/ They spend 111M out of 340M on managerial overhead, or about a third. This is on the higher side, but not too much out of line with the general industry (not saying that it's a good thing, but that's how the world works). I have to wonder though, how much of that money is actually spent on Firefox? 530M in royalties, how much is that per FF user?

walrus01 4y ago
It's a sad state of the large, useful search engine industry that they're faced with a lesser-of-two-evils choice for default search engine (thus driving royalties), between Google or Bing. Unless anybody is smoking something really strong and suggests something like baidu search or yandex search.
chomp 4y ago
There's a line item that suggests approximately 200 million goes to the software development program (which is the Foundation, MZLA, and Mozilla Corp combined), but I can't tell how much is spent on Firefox itself.

gamjQZnHT53AMa 4y ago

Threads about the finances of Mozilla are always full of criticism and begrudging. Yeah, they take money from Google, and that keeps them alive. Yeah, they would love to not be so reliant on them. This is old news. But while they are alive, and while Firefox continues development, Google have slightly less of a grip on the internet. That is undeniably a good thing. Mozilla getting paid by Google is a better scenario than Firefox being abandoned and Google controlling the browser engine space entirely.

chrisseaton 4y ago
Almost nobody uses Firefox - it's Safari that keeps balance in the browser world.
- ianbutler 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers To be fair, you are correct in the mobile space, and that is now the lion share of devices, but Firefox does have a healthy 7.5% usage in the desktop space if the metrics on this page are to be believed.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - tpush 4y ago
    Why not just look at market share across all devices? Which makes chrisseaton's point: Firefox sits at 3.26% as opposed to Safari at 18.61%.
    - ianbutler 4y ago
      Because mobile and desktop are different markets
    - heavyset_go 4y ago
      Because all browsers are Safari on the mobile platform that has 60% of market share in the US.

open592 4y ago

AntiRemoteWork 4y ago

sciurus 4y ago

There's some analysis of this and an interview with Mozilla's CEO at https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/17/mozilla-looks-to-its-next-chapter/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/17/mozilla-looks-to-its-next-...

pmarreck 4y ago

Not sure if anyone from Mozilla is here to comment, but now that Google has decided to abandon support for the otherwise-promising JPEG-XL standard in Chrome, will Firefox press on with support for it?

pmarreck 4y ago

Firefox is a fantastic browser. Switched to it from Chrome about a year or 2 ago and haven't looked back. I run Nightly and it's the only browser installed on my main dev machine, a NixOS behemoth from System76 (Thelio Major).

sorwin 4y ago

I get that Mozilla is far more than just Firefox, but what are they actually spending so much money on? They have 750 employees, yet Firefox (their main product) barely sees any impactful updates. Either there is a lot of bloat, money mismanagement, or just bad leadership (which covers the previous).

footlose_3815 4y ago

[dead]

Ptchd 4y ago

What is the source of this increase of revenue?