Mozilla's 2012 Annual Report: 90% of Revenue Came From Google

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla today released its annual financial report for 2012, and while revenue is up quite substantially, the organization's reliance on Google continues to grow. In 2011, 85 percent of Mozilla's revenue came from Google. In 2012, the figure increased to 90 percent."

Comments

Because they put out crap

[OverlordQ]

It's because instead of listening to what the users want, they plow ahead with stupid UI-redesigns to make Firefox a slower, buggier Chrome clone. I mean sure, the new UI is spiffy, but they can't fix a nearly ten year old bug with find.

Re:Because they put out crap

[girlintraining]

You know, if half the Firefox users who complain about this actually donated to Mozilla on a regular basis, I'll bet Google wouldn't even have to account for half of Mozilla's revenue.

You really think charity-work is going to be able to drum up as much money as one of the largest companies on the face of the Earth? Good luck with that.

Mozilla Goes Evil, Film at 11

[girlintraining]

... And we wonder why they backed off the Do Not Track, why plugins are no longer being vetted to ensure they're actually doing what they say, etc. Guys... How much more evidence do you need that Google is evil -- they're sending vans in your neighborhood, taking pictures of your houses, collecting your wifi network names, OTA traffic, embedding realtime tracking into your phones, and the list goes on. We piss ourselves like excited dogs at the prospect of the NSA spying on us (Sorry but you just aren't that interesting), but when Google does ten times that and is whoring out your personal data like it has a crack addiction, we find people saying "Ah, well, it's a convenience, and how else do you expect us to get all these nifty apps if we don't surrender all our privacy and have advertisements shoved down our throats?"

And now they've infected the only major open source software browser out there. And it's just a matter of time before they pull the rug out from under the organization and it implodes. But it's cool... you can always upgrade to Chrome. And as a bonus... it'll happily store every interaction you make with your browser on Google's servers. Isn't that... convenient?

Re:Mozilla Goes Evil, Film at 11

[Jane Q. Public]

"And we wonder why they backed off the Do Not Track ..."

The only thing they "backed off" from was a a default setting. Big deal. IIRC, they were the first to even include that feature in their browser.

They also support -- and highly recommend -- a plugin that lets you see ALL the "3rd parties" who are tracking you when you visit a website. AFAIK there is still no other browser that offers such functionality. Not even Ghostery does the same job.

"And now they've infected the only major open source software browser out there."

How? How have they "infected" it? The only thing going on here is that they get royalties from Google ads... as do many, many other people and companies. Has Google "infected" them, too? If you run some Google ads are you "infected"?

Mozilla was not always getting most of its revenue from Google, Google isn't "giving" them the money, it's from ads, and Google's disappearance tomorrow would not make Mozilla "implode". They'd just have to advertise elsewhere.

I think you have extremely grossly overstated your case.

Re:Mozilla Goes Evil, Film at 11

[Kjella]

Mozilla was not always getting most of its revenue from Google, Google isn't "giving" them the money, it's from ads, and Google's disappearance tomorrow would not make Mozilla "implode". They'd just have to advertise elsewhere.

You're right, up to 2005 Mozilla got most their money from their AOL sugar daddy, but ever since they've had to make money on their own it's been overwhelmingly Google, it was 85% in 2006 and 90% now in 2013. They've never had any significant non-Google revenue. It's not ads, it's overwhelmingly search engine referrals which means that if Google ended their business relationship with Mozilla they'd have to change their default search engine to either Bing or Yahoo (same thing really) to get referral royalties from Microsoft instead. If users rejected it and kept using Google (hint: Google's market share is much higher than Chrome+Mozilla, meaning many IE users also favor Google) then Mozilla wouldn't see a cent.

It's open source so I'm sure it'd never die as such but the reason Mozilla exists as a major company is because it's better for Google to have an arm's length partner that can attack Microsoft/IE from different angles appealing to different crowds and acting as two voices in the development of standards rather than slim it down to a near-duopoly Chrome/IE marketplace. A lot of people will back Mozilla because it's open source and "neutral" but wouldn't get behind Google or Microsoft to push their browser. But the money to keep developing it comes pretty much exclusively from Google and the only real alternative would be Microsoft, which I'm quite sure neither Mozilla nor Microsoft would want. Otherwise it'd just be the "other" 10-15% of Mozilla's revenue left.

Re:They sold out a long time ago

[amiga3D]

What a stupid comment. Everyone has to have revenue of some kind. What were they going to do? Operate off of donations? They provide a class browser for free. Next best free alternative? Chrome browser. Guess who makes that?

Why This is Dangerous

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

As I see it, there are two main problems with this situation:

(1) The obvious - that Google will have undue influence over Mozilla's design decisions. Some will argue that is impossible, etc. Maybe so, but money talks.

(2) The less obvious - that Google will fall on hard times and Mozilla will find themselves high and dry. Some people argue that Bing and other search engines also bid to be default search engine in Firefox so Mozilla could just switch to one of them for a nearly equivalent revenue stream. But the main reason there were other bids is because Google is so dominate. If Google tanks, then the other search engines will be in a stronger position and won't need Mozilla as much as they do today. So the money they are likely to offer will also be reduced.

Re:Why This is Dangerous

[Jane Q. Public]

"As I see it, there are two main problems with this situation:"

Why do you consider [1] to be a problem?

Did you read TFA? The "revenue" in question here is royalties from advertisements. Many, many other people & companies get royalties from Google for advertisements. Do you claim that Google is likely to "influence" all of them, too?

It's advertising revenue. If it isn't Google, it's going to be someone else. And it doesn't give Google any "leverage".

Re:Why This is Dangerous

[rahvin112]

Google doesn't write a check to Firefox out of kindness. They get a cut of ad impressions from search referrals, just like any site that links their search to Google.

It's a big check because every time you search Google with Firefox then click an ad that results in a sale Mozilla gets a referral credit. The higher ad rates are the more money they get for click through. This is why Mozilla's Firefox revenue continues to grow, ad revenue (due to ad prices increasing) is going up and the part Google shares with referrals is a fixed percentage of that increasing price. When internet ad prices fell Mozilla's revenue from referrals went down, when they go up the amount goes up.

Because they are getting the money from the referral program there is no direct money and little to no influence. You could get the same referral money if you could write software that people used to search Google with. If anything Google is more beholden to Mozilla because of the amount of traffic Mozilla kicks towards Google. For example, if Mozilla were to switch the default search in Firefox to Bing Google would lose a significant number of searches and ad impressions. This is one of the reasons Google built the Chrome browser, they didn't want to be so dependent on Mozilla and every user using Chrome means a smaller Cut to Mozilla and more money Google retains.

Yes, Mozilla needs the money, but changing the default to Bing would harm Google more than Mozilla and ultimately keeping that default setting on Google is far more important to Google which basically limits or even eliminates Google's influence over Mozilla.

Re:Why This is Dangerous

[MacDork]

The web is broken anyway. CAs can't be trusted. Client-Server architecture funnels all data into what amounts to massive NSA honeypots. And look, we're right back to where we were with Windows/IE, except now it's Android/Blink with Google propping up Mozilla to pretend they are competitors.

On the developer end of things, HTML5 sucks. We still can't even rename buttons on a javascript confirm dialog. You need something like SASS just to make CSS usable, and God help you if you have a client that wants tables that work like native ones in OS X.

Oh, and the shepherd of this monstrosity? The guy who preached openness and collaboration? Hollywood asked him for DRM and he's all like, "Sound legit."

The web is doomed. Not because native apps are going to take it out. It's because it is broken and the leadership has all wandered off in their own self interested directions. Something better is going to come along and the web will be remembered fondly, just like newsgroups.

Re:Why This is Dangerous

[rudy_wayne]

"As I see it, there are two main problems with this situation:"

Why do you consider [1] to be a problem?

Did you read TFA? The "revenue" in question here is royalties from advertisements. Many, many other people & companies get royalties from Google for advertisements. Do you claim that Google is likely to "influence" all of them, too?

It's advertising revenue. If it isn't Google, it's going to be someone else. And it doesn't give Google any "leverage".

No, you don't understand what is happening.

A default installation of Firefox contains a Google search box. This means that when people want to search for something they are most likely to use that search box, which dives traffic to Google, which greatly improves Google's chance of making money from the ads associated with search results.

In return for Mozilla putting a Google search box in Firefox, Google currently pays Mozilla $300 Million a year. That's just under a billion dollars over the course of their 3 year contract, which expires at the end of 2014.

This is why Do Not Track if off by default. This is why ad-blocking isn't built in to Firefox. If you think that Google giving Mozilla a billion dollars doesn't give them any influence, well, that's your problem.
 

Re:Why This is Dangerous

[LordLimecat]

Do not track is off by default because turning it on by default would literally make it a useless standard.

Re:Why This is Dangerous

[geminidomino]

would literally make it a useless standard.

No, I'm pretty sure that was accomplished during the design phase. Anything that relies on advertisers "following the rules" is a failure from the word go. They're just spammers with banner ads.

Is this Google calling the tune or...

[Anonymous Coward]

Another, perhaps more likely possibility, is that Google is worrying about what could happen if they didn't fund Mozilla:

1) a direct competitor like Amazon or Microsoft might step in to take their place

-or-

2) FF could move in a direction of privacy advocacy, and set up defaults that would defeat the tracking and content-pushing policies of big sites like Google and Macromedia

Re:They sold out a long time ago

[Jane Q. Public]

"They sold out a long time ago"

In what way? They're the only major "independent" browser. They're the browser that has led the field in personal privacy, security, and blocking trackers. They're the ones who put out a mobile phone OS that doesn't try to lock you in to one company's services.

I'd like to know how you think any of that is "selling out".

Re:ABANDON SHIP

[nullchar]

You obviously do not use, nor rely on, extensions. Extensions for Chrome/Chromium pale in comparison to what extensions for Firefox can do.

Want tabs on the side? Good luck with Chrome. Good luck with alternate Webkit browsers with not enough marketshare to attract extensions.

Simple things like holding control (and optionally shift!) to select cell values or entire columns in a table are what set Firefox apart from other browsers.

Re:Slashdot...

[nullchar]

Every November, Mozilla releases its financial report for the previous year.

FTFA.

Re:They sold out a long time ago

[Anonymous Coward]

Safari also sucks, by default.

Re:They sold out a long time ago

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it breaks the fucking web. So much so that Google have hacked people's installations of Safari to disable it.

Mozilla are the only ones actively trying to solve that problem, and yet the only thing your kind can see and say is "they haven't fixed it yet!" If you feel that god damn strongly about it, because part of the solution.

It's easy to wag fingers at the smallest guy in the ring for not doing all the work, but it doesn't make you right. It makes you sound like a boorish oaf who can't be bothered to use RequestPolicy and would rather someone else solve the problem for them YESTERDAY, conveniently without even paying them for the work.

An enviable position

[TheloniousToady]

What a position to be in: you give away all your products but are well funded by a wealthy patron. Yet the patron gives away a product comparable to your primary product, and gives away a service that provides many of the features of your secondary product.

Wealthy patrons are nothing new, and those who rely on patronage have always been in a precarious position. But rarely have they been in direct competition with their patrons.

Re:An enviable position

[TheGratefulNet]

android is most certainly NOT free for oems!

for you and me, we can get source and do most of what we want. oem's have to pay and pay dearly to get access and sell phones with android on it.

its never been free, in any sense of the word.

why does it always have to be bigger/"better"?

[SuperBanana]

What were they going to do? Operate off of donations?

Aside from you ignoring the giant white elephant in the room, which is that Google is increasingly encompassing or influencing every aspect of the internet it possibly can, which is NOT HEALTHY...Why not operate off donations? They're not a for-profit corporation, they don't have investors or shareholders, etc.

There was ZERO need for growing Mozilla into the monster it is today with a finger in everything. What the fuck is Mozilla doing promoting a surfing competition? Why the fuck is Mozilla making an OS and trying to sell cell phones?(Did all the OpenMoko failures start squatting at Mozilla HQ or something?) Why does the Mozilla website design change every month?

While I'm ranting: nobody was clamoring for the moron-ization of Firefox's controls (some privacy-related, like the stripping-out of the ability to expire history+cache+cookie data older than a certain time period. Want to only keep the last 7 days of history? Too fuckin' bad! Gee, who has an interest in that? Advertisers like GOOGLE) or the butchering of Thunderbird at the hands of some 20-year old self-proclaimed UX expert.

About the only thing I see Mozilla doing well these days is pissing people off with every application update, something Google excels at, as well.

And by the way, get off my lawn.

Re:why does it always have to be bigger/"better"?

[Smauler]

Why not operate off donations? They're not a for-profit corporation, they don't have investors or shareholders, etc.

Well, their expenses for software development in 2012 were almost $150,000,000. Their expenses for branding and marketing were almost $30,000,000.

Now, if you can find enough people to make those donations, good luck.

You could (and probably should) argue that their expenses should not be that high, but they're never going to hit that revenue with donations.

Re:why does it always have to be bigger/"better"?

[Microlith]

Why not operate off donations?

You know as well as I do that there is no way they would get enough donations. If they switched to that it's a virtual guarantee that Mozilla would be gone within a year.

What the fuck is Mozilla doing promoting a surfing competition?

Branding.

Why the fuck is Mozilla making an OS and trying to sell cell phones?

For the same reason they make Firefox - diversity and promotion of standards. They don't sell cellphones though.

nobody was clamoring for the moron-ization of Firefox's controls

Moron-ization? Between all the addons I've never had a more complex and capable browser. Perhaps you are annoyed at the defaults?

Want to only keep the last 7 days of history? Too fuckin' bad!

So purge it regularly? It's the second entry in the History menu. Of course, there are always addons that let you do just what you want.

Gee, who has an interest in that? Advertisers like GOOGLE

Paranoid accusation made, now prove that Google has access to it. Go on, do it.

About the only thing I see Mozilla doing well these days is pissing people off with every application update

And in my experience, people look aggressively for things to be pissed off about. Mozilla can do no right to many on Slashdot, so I can only assume they all use Chrome, IE, and Safari.

Re:why does it always have to be bigger/"better"?

[washort]

with regard to cellphones - do you *like* living in a world where the only reasonable choices for a smartphone involve software wholly controlled by Google or by Apple? Firefox OS may not be able to replace those today, but it's a step in the right direction - a platform for mobile apps that aren't tied to a single vendor.

Re:why does it always have to be bigger/"better"?

[Ash-Fox]

Let's be fair, Anonymous Coward doesn't have a good history of comments to back him up.

Re:They sold out a long time ago

[arth1]

Because it breaks the fucking web. So much so that Google have hacked people's installations of Safari to disable it.

Out of the goodness of their heart. It obviously has nothing to do with 3rd party cookies being used for tracking and generating ad revenue.

No, you don't need 3rd party cookies. The benign use of those is almost non-existing, and the only "breakage" are sites that deliberately won't work unless they can track you. If you're fine with that, there's a Chrome for you.

Re:They sold out a long time ago

[Anonymous Coward]

Look, if you're unwilling to actually read the Bugzilla and forum threads about this, don't get on your high horse. Any user who WANTS third party cookies off can easily do so. This is about the users who don't realize they want third party cookies off, and Mozilla has to step far more lightly with them because it DOES break the web. Lots of sites will break if you don't also see their ads or allow their trackers to work. And that's just advertising. Lots of other sites use third-party cookies not for ad-tracking, and they can break too.

Re:ABANDON SHIP

[nullchar]

How about:
  - TabKit (tabs on the side, how does anyone browse without this?!!)
  - FoxyProxy
  - NoScript (it's not the same on Chrome)
  - Redirector
  - Screen Capture Elite
  - HTML Validator
  - Refcontrol (blocks/fakes referrer header)
  - Better Privacy (flash cookie blocker/sanitizer)

The list goes on...

Re:They sold out a long time ago

[noh8rz10]

This is FUD. Please demonstrate any problems with default 3rd party blocking, other than advertising and tracking. Specific sites and examples. If you're right, it shouldn't be hard.

Re:They sold out a long time ago

[Runaway1956]

I'll repeat what I said above - disabling 3rd party cookies does not break the web. The fact is, those sites you mention intentionally break the web, then tell you that if you want to see the web, you have to enable their cookies. The web is there, with or without the cookies. Holding the web hostage, and telling users that they aren't permitted to see the web unless you can track them is evil. I don't do 3rd party cookies. Occasionally, some weird thing happens, and I can't see what I thought I wanted to see. I say, "Big deal - I didn't need that anyway!" I go on, and find the content that I was looking for through some other provider.

Re:They sold out a long time ago

[Jane Q. Public]

"Because it breaks the fucking web. So much so that Google have hacked people's installations of Safari to disable it."

It does absolutely nothing of the sort. It breaks some companies' business models on the web. Those are not even remotely the same things.

If those companies disappeared tomorrow, the web would remain. Hell, it might even be a better place.

Open Source spending $30M on branding?

[SuperBanana]

Their expenses for branding and marketing were almost $30,000,000.

This. This is the problem right here. Why does an open-source project need to spend thirty million dollars promoting a "brand" most people are already fully aware of? Firefox already has a healthy enough market share; there's no NEED for it to have more.

And why does it cost $150M/year to work on a browser, email client, and some dev tools? They have 650 or so employees - assuming every single one was a developer, they're spending $230,000 on each one.

If it truly costs $150M/year to work on the "products" Mozilla produces, that's absurdly inefficient.

Re:Open Source spending $30M on branding?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who has not heard of Coke? Those idiots that run that company should stop marketing.

Re:Open Source spending $30M on branding?

[fatwilbur]

Why does an open-source project need to spend thirty million dollars promoting a "brand" most people are already fully aware of?

Why does Coke spend far more than that on all sorts of TV commercials when everyone obviously is fully aware of their brand? Advertising works, and gets more people familiar with and using your products. If this is a goal of Mozilla, this is not an outrageous expenditure depending on how they calculate return.

And why does it cost $150M/year to work on a browser, email client, and some dev tools? They have 650 or so employees - assuming every single one was a developer, they're spending $230,000 on each one

Is this somehow shocking for onshore/local resources? The IT shop I managed at, I always estimated each full-time senior as costing about $250,000 a year. They didn't make nearly all of that, but once you factor in office space cost, training, pension, benefits, savings plan, bonus, etc., etc., the cost escalates over $200k very> easily, and this is nowhere near silicon valley.

You whine and moan about them trying new things, but why not? Don't they have employees that want to try new things, learn new stuff? Who says they have to remain doing the same old thing forever? That's how you become irrelevant in your market, and like it or not they are fighting for marketshare. Your arguments make no sense.

Re:Open Source spending $30M on branding?

[Nemyst]

"Most"? On what planet are you living there? Most people wouldn't recognize Firefox even with the About page opened in front of their eyes. They need to do constant marketing so they stay visible to the population outside of Slashdot comments sections (which aren't the people targeted by these ads). If they don't do ads, they'll just fade away, guaranteed.

You might not like the reality of such things, but it's how the world works. Without marketing, they'd lose out on partnerships, on funding opportunities, they'd get less visible to outsiders who might not think about it and install that Chrome thing they saw on TV instead, etc. It's important for them to stick around and stay visible, and marketing's the only way to do it.

Re:Open Source spending $30M on branding?

[geminidomino]

Or, rather, do you consider R&D to be pointless and not something Mozilla should do?

When I consider most of the "innovations" we've seen since Firefox 3.5, I find that this smart-ass rhetorical might actually be preferable.

Re:Open Source spending $30M on branding?

[osu-neko]

You have absolutely no idea of the expenses involved in operating a company, obviously. A quarter of a million per employee is not absurd, understanding that only a fraction of that is salary.

Re:Open Source spending $30M on branding?

[thsths]

> If this is a goal of Mozilla, this is not an outrageous expenditure depending on how they calculate return.

Yes, it is outrageous - because Mozilla is not in it for the profit or the return - Mozilla is a not for profit organization! The goals are centered around open source, access to the internet, open platform, and the public benefit. Marketing is not going to achieve those benefits.

Re:Open Source spending $30M on branding?

[Kvasio]

like the US market was the only one that mattered, Einstein

Re:Open Source spending $30M on branding?

[Anonymous Coward]

You should have quoted the entire paragraph, as your reply otherwise addresses a straw man. Here's the quote, and your response with the bits you removed highlighted in bold.

Why does Coke spend far more than that on all sorts of TV commercials when everyone obviously is fully aware of their brand? Advertising works, and gets more people familiar with and using your products. If this is a goal of Mozilla, this is not an outrageous expenditure depending on how they calculate return.

Yes, it is outrageous - because Mozilla is not in it for the profit or the return - Mozilla is a not for profit organization! The goals are centered around open source, access to the internet, open platform, and the public benefit. Marketing is not going to achieve those benefits.

So with the fully restored quote, you can see there's no indication of chasing profits? It seems quite the reverse with the quote mining dealt with. Is it not in the long-term interests of the project to encourage adoption? Less than 15% of their total spending is going to marketing, and maintaining and growing the user base brings in more money. This isn't some niche open source project that can get by through word of mouth and geek factor; Mozilla is competing for regular end users who are being chased by companies with pretty deep pockets.

Re:Open Source spending $30M on branding?

[rpdillon]

Chrome changed the game in two ways: it focused on speed/security, and it brought many of the geeks back to a closed-source browser. Sure enough, Google is slowly building in proprietary non-standards compliant tech into Chrome. It's not as overt as ActionScript with IE back in the bad ol' days, but we're getting there, IMHO. Mozilla is the last bastion of a free, standards-compliant browser. And Mozilla has done amazing work in the last few releases to make Firefox faster. And, their R&D is impressive. While Google wants to make the web faster by pushing everyone to integrate a new language into every browser engine (Dart), Mozilla created asm.js. http://kripken.github.io/mloc_emscripten_talk/sloop.html I'd assert that the work Mozilla is doing is vital to the continued health of the internet. I don't agree with every decision they make, but asserting that it's somehow a better idea for them to drop most of the work they're doing and start funding themselves through PayPal or Kickstarter every year is absurd. Every other major browser (Chrome, IE, Safari) has a multi-hundred-billion dollar company backing it. Marketing and R&D are critical parts of Mozilla's survival strategy.

Re:They sold out a long time ago

[LordLucless]

They received 90% of their total income from Google. By any reasonable definition, they were funded by Google.

What obligations that funding puts them under is a separate question. There may be no strings attached to that money, but even so, it gives Google leverage, even if that leverage isn't utilised. The question is whether you can be considered "independent" when one of the main actors in the market has that much leverage over you.

Hopefully, invested.

[WindBourne]

Seriously, it would be to their benefit to invest this into companies so that they can pull dividends over a long period of time. And it should ones that are OSS friendly.

$4.1 million for 22 employees

[edibobb]

22 employees get an average of $188,000, 3000 volunteers get zero.

https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/2012_Mozilla_Form_990-Public_Disclosure.pdf

Re:$4.1 million for 22 employees

[edibobb]

Correction: 30,000 volunteers.

Mozilla's CTO gets $652,194

[Animats]

Mozilla's CTO, Brendan Eich, gets $652,194.

This is an organization that takes years to fix bugs and has a huge legacy code base they can barely manage. (There's still a lot of Netscape stuff in there.)

Re:Mozilla's CTO gets $652,194

[Zedrick]

> Mozilla's CTO, Brendan Eich, gets $652,194.

Even if he's a bad CTO, roughly $650 sounds a bit low. Firefox is screwed up, but still somewhat usable and I think he would deserve at least a normal salary.

Re:They sold out a long time ago

[wonkey_monkey]

Utter nonsense. It breaks nothing to disable third party cookies. Absolutely nothing.

It broke YouTube commenting.

Finance is not economy

[Errol backfiring]

Most of the contributions are not financial in an open-source project. So if you focus on money only, you can only get irrelevant results.