MDN Plus: Mozilla plans to launch premium developer service
Firefox developer Mozilla plans to launch its next premium service next month according to information published by Sören Hentzschel on his blog. The service, MDN Plus, extends the free MDN Web Docs resource for developers.
Mozilla's main source of income comes from its main competitor in the browser space, Google. The agreement between Mozilla and Google ends next year, and it is not clear if both parties will renew the agreement. While Mozilla does have a few options in the case the renewal should fall through, it has changed its strategy in regards to revenue generation in recent years.
In 2020, Mozilla earned $496 million in revenue, a slight increase of $6 million when compared to 2019 if you ignore a one-time payment Mozilla received in that year. The bulk of the revenue came from search engine deals; agreements to make a specific search engine the default in the Firefox web browser. A total of $441 million was contributed by search engine deals.
Revenue from other services, mostly subscription-based services, rose from $14 million in 2019 to $24 million in 2020. Mozilla did launch additional products, including Firefox Relay Premium and Mozilla VPN, which will likely increase the overall revenue from subscription-based services going forward.
Hentzschel reports that Mozilla may launch the new MDN Plus service as early as March of 2022. Mozilla did test MDN Plus in Summer of 2021 and revealed after the test period that it had plans to launch MDN Plus in the future to the public.
According to Hentzschel's information, Mozilla could launch the service on March 9, 2022 in select countries, including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Italy, France, and some other countries.
The subscription-based service will offer in-depth technology articles from experts and additional features to improve MDN Web Docs usage, including offline usage, personal collections, change notifications, or theming options. The price may be $10 per month or $100 per year according to Hentzschel's information.
Closing Words
Mozilla needs to diversify its revenue stream to reduce the dependence on search engine deals. Subscription-based revenue is on the rise and the creation of new services will certainly contribute to the overall revenue, provided that services are not dropped in the future.
It will be interesting to see how well these services did in 2021 compared to 2020.
Now You: do you use one of Mozilla's premium services?
>premium
One of my most despised buzzword. It has the allure of high quality & exclusivity, but in reality “premium” features in software is really just above average functions for a price. but to be positive; it appears Mozilla is really trying to break free from Google’s grasp. Hopefully they’ll succeed, but at this rate it’s likely they’ll end up like NeroBurningROM; a steep spiral into decline, fueled by feature-creeping, bloat & bad business decisions.
I’ll not be paying for this service in near time but it is quite appealing.
pardon my twitchy finger, the above post seems to be in the wrong article.
Remedy: during a Linux installation, use LVM/ LUKS2 encryption with the ‘complete drive erase’ box ticked, best of both worlds and a bonus of mental wellbeing going forward :)
Surprised they’re making money from these things but whatever…
I find admirable that some Yapenese companies punish from the top such as the CEO when the company does not perform well, for example replacing the CEO, cutting CEOs salary. The wests way of yeeting their slave wagers and then the CEO flying off into the sunset with a golden parachute before running the company into the ground is sickening. Allegedly the net worth of current CEO of For profit/Non profit Mozzarella a cool 137 million dollhairs. Just a bit less than Linus who make 10 million a year and is worth 170million. I quite fondly remember her justifying raising her salary because she’s a rich kleptomaniac. Shes done a lot for mozilla and the web but as the saying goes ‘You either die a hero, or you live long enough to become the villain. Mozilla needs to refresh themselves of Michelle Baker.
Is Yapen a new country?
Funnily enough, the photo used in the article is taken from Brave Browser.
I use all browsers, and the news is about the web service, which can be opened in any browser :)
Hi Martin,
Can you turn off auto scrolling to the next article? Its confusing users of the site which article they are commenting on.
I second this. I scroll down to get to the comments and end up somewhere I didn’t want to be.
MDN was my go-to place for a decade or more… but that was back when I was a dev, which I don’t do anymore (certainly not with Mozilla in mind). I think Mozilla is a little out of touch with their current reality as an after-thought.
Honestly don’t get it. Who would pay for something like this?
@ShintoPlasm
I am sure some idiots who think they are better than others and make them smarter or whatever for supporting the dead same bigtech company like Mozilla and their whole desperate moves.
Seriously have many times have you read people saying you should use Firefox because if not you are giving too much power to CHROMIUM. Like if Brave ideals were the same as Google or Microsoft or Vivaldi or Opera.
It’s dumb how people think sometimes, at this point, Firefox can start banning them, censoring their content, or what they have already done, spam people’s android phone with censoring campaigns like they did against Facebook, and some people will still keep using that garbage browser but a garbage company
Looks like the upper management will try literally anything to grab some more cash for themselves before their market share dwindles into obscurity.
‘Who would pay for something like this?’
This is a big damn world.