That independence from Google is key to creating a “healthier” business model. Mozilla’s combined subscription and ad revenue rose from $14 million in 2019 to $24 million in 2020, and the company says it expects 2021’s financial results to show new products contributing 14 percent of its revenue. And the company is pushing more into advertising as well, placing ads on new tabs that are opened in the Firefox browser. It has also launched two similar VPN-style products that people can subscribe to. The company owns read-it-later service Pocket, which includes a paid premium subscription service. However, Mozilla and Firefox acknowledge that for its long-term future it needs to diversify the ways it makes money. Mozilla’s financial declarations from 2020 said that despite the layoffs it is in a healthy place, and it expects its financial results for 2021 to show revenue growth. Deckelmann says Mozilla doesn’t reveal details about arrangements with its partners and declined to say whether negotiations with Google are ongoing. But there’s no guarantee Google will renew at the same level. The company’s own figures show its monthly active users have stayed stable at around 215 million. Stats show Firefox’s market share has dropped around 1 percent over the course of this agreement. The Google-Mozilla deal was last renewed in 2020 and is expected to expire in 2023. (Google also pays Apple huge sums each year to ensure it is the default search engine in Safari.) Firefox has other default search engine partners, such as Yandex Search in Russia, and these royalties are also crucial. In its 2020 financial results, the most recent available, Mozilla listed its total revenue as $496 million, with royalties from search deals equaling $441 million. Each year Google pays Mozilla hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties-reports say that figure is currently in the range of $400 million per year-for its search engine to be set as the default in Firefox. While they may be competitors, they are also business partners. Mozilla and Google have a complicated relationship. “It's not super reasonable for Firefox to expect to win back even any browser share at this point.” Another former Mozilla employee, who also asked not to be named for fear of career repercussions, says: “They're just going to have to accept the reality that Firefox is not going to come back from the ashes.” Their hopes for a Firefox revival are not high. “Chrome has won the desktop browser war,” says one former Firefox staff member, who worked on browser development at Mozilla but does not want to be named, as they still work in the industry. Similar plans to replace third-party cookies in Chrome-a move that will impact millions of marketers and publishers-are shaped in Google’s image. When Google launched its AMP publishing standard, websites jumped to implement it. Since its release in 2008, Chrome has become synonymous with the web: it’s used by around 65 percent of everyone online and has a huge influence on how people experience the Internet. For years, it was the best contender for keeping Google Chrome in check, offering a privacy-forward alternative to the world’s most dominant browser. Its fate also has larger implications for the web as a whole. All of that has left industry analysts and former employees concerned about Firefox’s future. A spate of privacy-focused browsers now competes on its turf, while new-feature misfires have threatened to alienate its base. Next year, its lucrative search deal with Google-responsible for the vast majority of its revenue-is set to expire. But its market share decline was accompanied by two rounds of layoffs at Mozilla during 2020. In the two decades since Firefox launched from the shadows of Netscape, it has been key to shaping the web’s privacy and security, with staff pushing for more openness online and better standards. “In the last couple years, what we've seen is actually a pretty substantial flattening,” Deckelmann adds. Mozilla’s own statistics show a drop of around 30 million monthly active users from the start of 2019 to the start of 2022. “Looking back five years and looking at our market share and our own numbers that we publish, there's no denying the decline,” says Selena Deckelmann, senior vice president of Firefox. Almost 15 years later, things aren’t so rosy.Īcross all devices, the browser has slid to less than 4 percent of the market-on mobile it’s a measly half a percent. “Our market share in the regions above has been growing like crazy,” Ken Kovash, Mozilla’s president at the time, wrote in a blog post. In Indonesia, Macedonia, and Slovenia, more than half of everyone going online was using Firefox. Twenty percent of the 1.5 billion people online were using Mozilla’s browser to navigate the web. Santiago Mejia/San Francisco Chronicle reader comments 544 withĪt the end of 2008, Firefox was flying high.
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