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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."
... 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?
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
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?
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.
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.
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.
Please help metamoderate.