Mozilla's revenue increased in 2020 to $496 million
The Mozilla Foundation published the financial report for the year 2020 today, revealing that it earned $496 million in 2020. The Foundation earned $828 million in 2019, but $338 million came from a legal dispute with former search engine provider Yahoo.
Revenue increased by about $6 million in 2020 as a consequence if you ignore the $338 million one-time payment.
Subscription revenue is on the rise
If you look at the revenue sources, you will notice that revenue from royalties is still making the bulk of Mozilla's revenue. It dropped from about $451 million to $441, and includes all search engine deals.
Mozilla invested heavily in subscription-based products, and revenue from subscriptions rose from $14 million in 2019 to $24 million in 2020. It is still a low percentage of the overall revenue. Mozilla launched new products, including Firefox Relay Premium or Mozilla VPN, that will bring in additional revenue. Mozilla VPN launched in mid-2020 in a few countries, but the service is now available in additional regions, which will surely be reflected in the revenue for 2021. The reading service Pocket is still the main revenue driver according to Mozilla's report.
Cost reduction
Mozilla managed to reduce the overall expenses significantly in 2020. The foundation had expenses of $495 million in 2019 and managed to reduce the expenses to $439 million in 2020. Software development expenses dropped from $303 million in 2019 to $242 million in 2020. Other program services expenses, and branding and marketing expenses were reduced as well in 2020. General and administrative expenses rose to $137 million from $124 million the year before.
Mozilla fired 320 employees in 2020, reducing the total number of employees from over 1000 to less than 800.
Mozilla managed to increase its assets from $787 million in 2019 to $843 million in 2020.
Outlook for 2021
Mozilla renewed the search engine agreement with Google in 2020 for another three years. Both parties have not revealed the new agreement, and it remains to be seen how the new deal affects Mozilla's revenue in 2021 and the years that follow.
Revenue from subscription-based services will likely be higher in 2021 when compared to 2020, but it seems unlikely that it will reduce Mozilla's dependence on search engine deals in the coming years. Mozilla needs the revenue more than ever, and it will be interesting to see if (and how) the agreement with Google changed.
Closing Words
Mozilla did well financially in 2020, but it is too early to tell if 2021 will be an equally profitable year for the company. Much depends on the new agreement with Google and the success of the new subscription-based services.
Now You: what is your take on the report? (via Sören Hentzschel)
Mozilla also offers advertising services in three formats. The first is the New Tab advertising service, which places links to sponsored content when a new tab is opened in the Firefox web browser. The second format is through Pocket Hits. Pocket Hits may include paid advertisements, which are placed in email newsletters that get delivered to global Pocket users. Lastly, Mozilla also sells web advertisement spots on content that Mozilla licenses and syndicates from publisher partners across the web.
If you’re hell bent on using gecko, use a non-Mozilla Firefox fork. Librewolf seems like a good option.
good lucks to them.
I work for a toxic company and can tell you that these are all the hallmarks of a toxic company. Squandering money for all but the very top and shareholders whilst firing employees left right and center for the failings at the very top.
I have absolutely no faith in Mozilla utilizing said money in a manner of which will benefit the company, its employees and most of all the product and community they serve.
It’s essentially a house of cards. It may not come tumbling down today or tomorrow but it will happen eventually. Current experience suggests that the overall feeling in a company like this among its employees is that of dread and uncertainty whilst the people up the top sit willfully ignorant on their rented throne.
There is nothing really to celebrate here for anyone but the CEO and top puppets up the top levels of Mozilla.
Mozilla is an ad machine. Bulk of revenue to promote and shove in throats the big brother search engine, while “Mozilla VPN” is just Mozilla advertising for a third-party VPN and taking money for that, and if I remember well even their email relay may not really be their own service. And many more examples of that. Pocket makes money from ads personalized from browsing data (if you don’t know this, it’s just that you don’t live in the places that are already victim of that). And sponsored top sites (with tracking even there, of course, it’s Mozilla), and ads inserted in supposed “Mozilla news”, and web content altering ads inserted in supposed “experiments”, and “Scroll” ads (with tracking, it’s Mozilla), and sponsored add-on recommendations (including for badware ones, it’s Mozilla), both inside the software and on their web sites, where they took care that the browser is magically not allowed to block them there, and ads personalized from search queries (with typed content sent to advertisers, it’s Mozilla), and an “adblocker” product that aims to display its own personalized ads, and more…
Mozilla is militantly pushing adware (usually together with data monetization) as a legitimate revenue source in the open source (one can’t call that free software any more) world, but is fortunately still a sort of exception in doing that, in spite of its efforts to make it the norm for Google.
It is not just a Google proxy, its management is also infested with people who even when looking outside of Google can’t think outside of the ad paradigm , the main cancer of the web, the main threat they would be supposed to fight if they were what they claim to be.
And do not dare to write a fork that will remove their ads and tracking, or even promote one, or you will enter a world of pain. Behind the polished smiles of corporate propagandists trying to look like unwashed free software activists, lie merciless sharks who are ready to play dirty to enforce Google’s will.
Doesn’t matter. Firefox market share keeps going down.
Google is been nice lately. I mean… Mozilla, I mean, firing employees is the best they can do while the CEO is putting more money in her pocket.
Well more money while the browser keeps dying is not too bad, it just means, more nice times too come where they will keep releasing stuff that will grab users data, they will keep “trying to fix the internet” with extensions and programs that are meant to censor content.
I mean, what a nice alternative to Google.
I mean, Edge already surpassed them for the 3rd place in marketshare, but more revenue is always better than marketshare!
I mean, Edge already surpassed them for the 3rd place in marketshare, but more revenue is always better than marketshare!
Clearly, Edge has the huge advantage of being pushed on users of the most popular operating system in the world.
Makes me wonder… how long before they decide that s/w dev is just too much of a drain on profit to keep doing it.
It’s a good thing; the whole idea of business–make a realistic profit:
“Mozilla is growing its net worth. As a result of increased sales and decreased spending, Mozilla’s net worth increased from $ 787 million to $ 843 million.”
‘Software development expenses dropped from $303 million in 2019 to $242 million in 2020
…
General and administrative expenses rose to $137 million from $124 million the year before.’
So to save money they fired developers (who they need to add features and fix bugs for Firefox), but at the same time increased their general and administrative expenses.
This is not a sign of good management.
They are still losing users, and very dependant on a single company (Google) for income.
Time to get rid of the current management.
My suggstion for Mozilla is to invest in Thunderbird and a email server to make it a competitor to Outlook and Exchange for organisations and companies.
Let Thunderbird share the same code components with Firefox when both are running to reduce memory and storage usage. But for security, Thunderbird runs in it’s own process.
Than Mozilla can then add more servers with features like sharing documents, and video chat using webRTC.
There is demand for such products from a more privacy friendly company than Microsoft or Google.
I would not be surprised if Brave beats Mozilla to supplying this demand.
Good to see they aren’t losing market share either
https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
– Nov 23 2020: 222.5mn
– Nov 22 2021: 220.5mn
Yeah, cause you can believe without question the data released by liars@mozilla.
Lets face it you can hardly trust any numbers by any party anywhere be it business or gov. They all have an agenda.
Wow. And they didn’t even need to implement crypto scam in the browser.
As always, thanks to Google for supporting a free and healthy internet.
It looks like Mozilla will flourish for many years to come, to the delight of hundreds of millions of happy users, providing independence, performance and privacy.
That’s not a scam. But you can be tracked through it. A limitation of browser wallets. Don’t use it for general browsing if you use it for crypto.
> Software development expenses dropped from $303 million in 2019 to $242 million in 2020.
> General and administrative expenses rose to $137 million from $124 million the year before.
Fire the programmers. Raise the salaries of managers.
That’s a great plan, Walter. That’s f***in’ ingenious, if I understand it correctly. It’s a Swiss f***in’ watch.
What could go wrong?
It clearly works, their revenue increased. Are you saying your smarter than them?
@Anonymous
Revenue increased – marketshare decreased. Smart plan! https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/d6a/dc7/4a5001b7beea096457f480c8808572428b-09-roll-safe.rhorizontal.w700.jpg
Mozilla’s top management is really smart – in the ability to destroy the browser and make money off of it.
Firefox is niche now but they have stable marketshare for 2 years(source: netmarketshare), * [Editor: removed, please remain polite}?
@Honorius
> Fire the programmers. Raise the salaries of managers.
Without good managers, no programmers (when there are more than 10-20 people) can organize their own work. That’s Swiss watch 101 for sure.
The work of programmers has become much easier with the progress of telemetry and automatic error handling and prioritization (eg, the latest famous brilliant innovative redesign made using automatic analysis of user behavior).
/By the way, this is exactly why misinformation “Guides” from competitors always include a part about disabling telemetry, painting it as something harmful. While there is no reasonable need for this, telemetry only benefits product development./
You can hire as many coders as you want on any given day, as opposed to reliable, experienced, and process-immersed managers whose heart beats in tune with the corporation. Less is more, don’t forget this simple truth.