this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2024
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Mozilla makes about $590m a year.
$510m of that is from Google paying for the search engine default spot.
Well I for one hope they figure out an alternative income, like a premium subscription? Or perhaps look to get acquired by proton and get some integration going with those services? I'm no expert here, I just think that they have a lot of happy users, and there must be some way to figure this out financially.
They need to reform as a non-profit with user membership, an elected board, and fundraising like Wikipedia.
I'm not aware of any non-profit with staffing the size of Mozilla. The problem is that you need to be able to make money and to set it aside for bad times, so you don't have to fire employees the moment the donations falter.
The 501(c)(3) non-profit form of tax-exempt non-profit, which is what the Mozilla Foundation continues to be, is not allowed to do so. That's why they opened up the for-profit Mozilla Corporation subsidiary that does most of the Firefox development.
On the plus side, the only shareholder of the Mozilla Corporation is the Mozilla Foundation, which therefore essentially cannot accept any of the profit the MoCo might make.
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That's a ridiulously low amount of money given the amount of users. I'd happily pay 10-20 bucks a year to keep mozilla alive. Not that I like it much, but more so than the big alternatives
Yeah, Apple seems to be able to fetch a little more than a billion per percent of the browser market (18% at 20B), but Mozilla is only able to score 0.5B for 2-3% of the market. Mozilla is getting a quarter of Apple’s rate.
That said, Apple has a lot more leverage than Google, and they can strong arm a better deal. I also wouldn’t be surprised if Safari users are just a more valuable marketing cohort. Firefox’s user base is going to have a lot more people who opt out of and or block targeted marketing.