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Mozilla's 2013 Report: Revenue Up 1% To $314M; 90% From Google
An anonymous reader writes Mozilla has released its annual financial report for 2013, and the numbers hint as to why the organization signed a five-year deal with Yahoo, announced by the duo on November 19. Revenue increased just 1 percent, and the organization's reliance on Google stayed flat at 90 percent. The total revenue for the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiaries in 2011 was $163 million, and it increased 90.2 percent to $311 million for 2012. Yet that growth all but disappeared last year, as the total revenue moved up less than 1 percent (0.995 percent to be more precise) to $311 million in 2013. 85 percent of Mozilla's revenue came from Google in 2011, and that figure increased to 90 percent in 2012. While the 90 percent number remained for 2013, it's still a massive proportion and shows Mozilla last year could not figure out a way to differentiate where its money comes from.
Mozilla is a non-profit. They have a lot of expenses, so obviously revenue is important.
With 90% of their revenue coming from Google yet they just signed a 5 year deal with Yahoo how is this going to work out? Diversity in revenue streams is good and also getting off the Google teat is really good but I can't help but think that they just cut their own throat.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Maybe if they spent more time and resources on their project and less time and resources on "gender issues", they wouldn't be circling the toilet.
Their organization been corrupted at the highest levels. It's not going to be repaired. It'll just degenerate further until the project is forked or dies with a whimper.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Almost everyone except Microsoft is ignoring email clients...
That is a lot of money. What could they possibly be spending it on because it certainly isn't firefox. I mean... it is a nice browser... but.... 314 million?
I'm a little flabbergasted by these numbers.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
A lot of us benefit from Free Software. Android is primarily developed by Google, so it has a steady source of funding. GNU/Linux has a large community of volunteers, but is honestly developed primarily by businesses that get revenue from server support contracts (Red Hat, Intel, SuSE, IBM, Google, to name a few).
Firefox is, by a host of measures, the best browser available. If I'm reading arewefastyet properly, it's the browser with the fastest Javascript engine now. The last time I checked, it's the smallest download. It uses the least RAM. It starts fastest. It supports plugins on all platforms, including mobile.
The browser is key to practically every Internet service, and they all really should be contributing to the development of the one browser that's fully Free Software. Sadly, unlike Android and GNU/Linux, Firefox is essentially ad-supported. It's a bad situation for us, the users.
They spend $200M/year on software development -- have browsers become so complicated that Mozilla and associated projects need 1000+ developers?
How do you spend 1/3 a billion $ and get Firefox?
I mean, seriously, help me out here?
You get Firefox and a decent amount of research. From my perspective it's money well spent.
Just having that much money means that the organization becomes bloated, and then produces worse and worse software due to design-by-committee and such.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
Not that it bothers me as I un-installed Firefox when they had their witch hunt against one of their founders. I have been using Chrome ever since.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
As a long time Mozilla support who flipped out when firefox updated with sponsored ads the other day. What is the next best windows based browser that doesn't report back your browsing habits to the mothership?
So why are they moving to Yahoo again?
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$311 Million and they are circling the toilet !! What are they spending it on. I am sure they can rationalise their team and their product range. If it is profitability they want, they should focus in that direction and is find out what made them profitable, which might not be what is bringing in the money. Note Google makes money by selling our analytics but it is their presence on other fronts which makes them a household name.
A colleague of mine left our company to go work for them. I asked myself the same question....WHY? He loves developing web apps, and that's what he and evidently quite a large team of people are doing. Big bunch of people working on FireFox OS, bunch working on Apps to try and show off features and draw developers to their OS...and a phone...that's cheap, and runs web apps. There are lots of things I kind of like about what they're trying to do...but I admit it seems doomed to failure or just...meh.
Presumably a good chunk goes into keeping the accommodations, uh, humble....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
It's funny how well an organization can get along working out of a simple little office building until they have money coming in and then they need a big, fancy headquarters.
They have a lot of false expenses. Firefox is an open source project, there is no reason why Mozilla should be making 314 million...oh wait, they sold out.
A lot of talk about how and what they do with all the money Isn't Mozilla/FF a non profit? isn't there limits as to what they can spend the money on? don't know that's why I ask.
Jack of all trades,master of none
Exactly. Gotta keep adding features to justify the money long after the point that new features are much needed. And we end up with things like the awful bar and a disappearing title-bar mounted menu that stops working every few days on my system
Parkinson's other law
http://www.samizdata.net/2006/...
Pi hundred million. Nothing more to say, but I'm guessing if I don't add more I will run into the lameness filter.
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It would be very interesting to know who gets the $314 million every year.
During the same years that easy Google millions have been pouring in, Mozilla Foundation has become much more sloppily managed, it seems to me.
Firefox has become much less stable in the past few years when many windows and tabs are open for a long time. The most recent version crashes without activating the crash reporter. Instead of fixing the crashes, Mozilla Foundation has prevented reporting of them.
Apparently Mozilla Foundation is trying to discourage the use of the Thunderbird email client. The newest version of Thunderbird, 31.2.0, has the Save-As bug. All file saves are Save As, and suggest a different file name than name with which the email was saved before. The Save-As bug has been reported, but no new version has been released, giving the impression that the bug is deliberate.
Other obvious bugs were introduced into Thunderbird. For example, the fields for email addresses are much more difficult to read.
Pale Moon has been removing some of the issues in their FossaMail version of Thunderbird. I haven't tested it to see if the Save-As bug is fixed.
Yahoo knew this, and probably offered them $150 million a year (Google may even have declined to make an offer of renewal
From the official blog post you'll see that all the options, including a renewal of the Google contract, had stronger economic terms (for mozilla).
To spell it out: Google offer to renew the contract and to pay more than they currently do.
I see this partly as a way to diversify revenue, by having different partners in different geographical regions. And as a strategy to avoid a fostering a global search mono-culture.
Mozilla is squandering the money they have. It should be shows around to a range of open source projects. That sort of money could free dozens of major and important projects from their corporate sponsors' agendas.
That was my reaction as well. If Chromefox and a bunch of money-wasting vanity wank ("Firefox OS") is all we're getting for $300M, Google should be asking for their money back.
Every American gave them a dollar (in a manner of speaking). What, now they want two? What if we just have more kids? It appears the economy depends on it.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Can someone explain in non-accounting terms what is the financial construction between the two? Are these results really from the foundation or from a combination of the revenue from both? Thanks.
Not sure if my answer helps but once an open source or free product becomes dominant in an area (like web browsers), there is little/no chance that a commercial product can even enter the market, let alone survive. That's true with the web browser market today, all dominant web browsers are free (IE, firefox, safari, chrome etc.).
These free browsers have a monopoly because the barrier to entry is huge (million$ to build a web browser from scratch) but little chance of recouping that investment by giving it away for free. With no competition, you're stuck with whatever quality there already exists in existing products.
Whatever its flaws, Firefox still commands 30% of the browser market and $314M translates to less than $10 advertising cost/user/year.
You know how much bandwidth each Firefox update require?
With all due respect the browser has been kinda going to heck lately. Lots of performance and stability issues. I guess there's the phone, but it's not even popular enough to call it a flop. It's a complete non-starter. Where's the money going?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Of course capitalist rhetoric on the matter, is that principles don't really exist, and the only non-subjective value worth having is a massive pile of money, and or a submissive sex partner(s). They find the very notion of ethics disgusting.
As far as expenses go, they release a top tier competative browser that competes with commerical alternatives. Having full time developers, especially quality talent on such a critical open source component is critical.
So is the infrastructure needed to keep firefox going.(bandwith ain't free dude), Unless your looking at Moz's financial records, and actually understand how to run a non-profit, please shut the fuck up.
At least in my eyes, Mozilla is really successful without selling out. Unless you can provide how they comprosed their values.
Supporting DRM in HTML5, for a start.
http://thehackernews.com/2014/...
It's GNU/Linux dammit!