Mozilla's revenue was $421 million US Dollars in 2015, a sharp increase from 2014's $329 million US Dollars. Nearly all of it, $417 million US Dollars to be precise, come from royalty payments.
The financial report does not disclose actual deal numbers unfortunately. We don't know how much Yahoo, Baidu or Yandex pay Mozilla to be the default Firefox search engine in select regions.
The majority of Mozilla revenue is from Firefox web browser search partnerships around the world. Mozilla’s work is also supported through grants and individual donations.
The annual report post of the Mozilla Foundation indicates that the company has brokered additional deals with companies such as Google and DuckDuckGo. According to the report, Mozilla has a total of 12 search partnerships in 2015 and 2016, and that next year's financial report will show notable improvements as well.
Expenses have not risen nearly as much. Mozilla's total expenses in 2014 were $317 million US Dollars, in 2015 $337 million US Dollars. The bulk of the additional expenses went into branding and marketing which rose from $40 million in 2014 to $59 million in 2015.
Depends on the agreement they have. I think that Mozilla has one with DuckDuckGo. So as long as you use the firefox search bar with DDG they do get something. Maybe not as much as with the default engine but still something.
Both work I think...Seeing the numbers Firefox does not get more that 1 dollar per user per year from searches. If you are worried about supporting correctly just donate like 5 bucks on Mozilla and you already contributed more than the searches for a year.
It would be good if Mozilla created their own search engine to challenge the google monopoly on our access to information. This whole fake news thing should be a big red flag that demonstrates the need for real competition especially one with open source freedoms and transparency. Such a project would seriously boost their revenue stream if they monetised through ads etc.
It is difficult to get into that market. DDG is already a good alternative...I am not sure what Mozilla can do better. Also why would mozilla create a competitor on its main source of income that might also push people to use other browsers that include what most people use by default?
Also having a search engine that filter´s news is a whole lot of hurt. Besides the impossibility of the task, a search engine is supposed to just expose what you search as neutral as possible. Not filter based of the validity of the info on the results. This arises huge ethical issues on the free distribution of information and on who and how you decide what is valid and what is not. Filtering news is journalism and journalists should be the ones to do that, not search engines.
I agree that it would be difficult to crack the search engine market. My first question would be why? There are two main costs; one being software development and two hardware resources. If it were open source the software cost would be reduced and innovation increased. You would also get forks where areas of specific interest would created a highly tuned engine targetting different areas of interest. Those specialist areas would be desirable to advertisers increasing their value.
Hardware costs are much more affordable than fifteen years ago and shifting data around the web is more efficient as well. There are alternative models that could be used with some creative thinking. For example a hybrid cloud tormenting system might be workable where users would dedicate some of their local resources to the task.
The biggest problem is generating the user base and that is where all of googles competitors seem to fail. Why? Bing fails for the same reason we should break google's vice like grip! They can't be trusted to supply valid results based on organic data and they abuse data collected from their users. That's an over simplification of the problem but those are core issues for an end user. M$ have the greatest potential with bing and yet they hardly make a dent (fortunately, because they cant be trusted).
I rarely use duck duck go so I'm not in a position to give a valid response based on their model. I can give some generalisations first of all like others they hardly make a ripple in the digital ocean of search traffic. Some providers anonymise the user but seem to use forms of scraping googles data to provide results, which isn't ideal for many reasons (the anonymity is great and needed). Scraping flittered results does nothing to fix the real problem.
Are you saying that google have perfected search technology so we can all go back to sleep and leave them in charge? Personally I think there are a whole lot of things that Mozilla could bring to the table openness being one of the primary things from the get go. New innovations that haven't even been thought of at this point would be another. From an end user perspective they could provide a totally anonymised service or one where people could elect to share fragments of information to tailor results based on their interests, rather than some parasitic corporation snooping and steering results for financial and political reasons.
The "fake news" BS is 21st century book burning and centralised/monopolised search systems is a serious issue that needs to be broken up as soon as possible imho.
Mozilla seem like the obvious choice to spearhead that process.
I thought the point of this thread was to show that Mozilla is no longer dependant on revenue raised from google?
They receive revenue from google because google seeks to dominate and they have zero regard for the long term health of Mozilla and if google could be sure of their dominance without Mozilla they would cut them off in an instant!
Google were busy helping Mozilla with FIrefox development back in the day and that lead to the launch of chrome which was a kick in the teeth for Mozilla and also shows the true colours of the parasitic nature of google.
If it's such a bad idea why is the largest most dangerous corporation operating a browser search engine combo? The only difference is they already had the engine and they pretty much stole the browser. Mozilla can't return the favour because google keeps mission critical code secret!
Mozilla could use what we have learnt and experienced to build something great from the ground up without stealing other peoples work.
Under the current model Mozilla gets crumbs from the search engine table, when the could bake the f*ing cake, and put the money/increased revenue to good use elsewhere, and provide the world with a free and open search system in the process.
Your argument about people using other browsers makes zero sense to me? Are you assuming that the only way to take the market over is to force it through the browser? We already know that's BS...look how well M$ have done trying shit like that.
The way to win is through hearts and minds by offering a non-abusive, non-intrusive free and open search system that people can trust. And then people like us need to inform other people and we need too be configuring peoples machines to use it just like we did with google. I kick myself for promoting google back in it's infancy, but at that time things were very different. Hindsight is a wonderful thing especially if you can make use of it to tackle current issues.
You think I don't get that? Seriously, that's the primary premise of my argument!
We already know that search results are being manipulated based on various undisclosed algorithms. We also know that that process is going to be further refined to control the war on "fake news". No one should tell anyone else what news is fake or not, people should be free to consider all sources and draw a conclusion based on reason.
That is just a silly proposition - journalists have already proven they can't be trusted for at least seventy years or more. Google was a major factor in the demise of the fraudulent MSM control grid. The problem is google is/has morphed into a 21st century control grid with even greater centralisation and far more powerful tools with global reach, that can switch direction on any issue virtually instantaneously.
We need alternatives right now because the net is drawing closed at an ever increasing rate. And google or any parasitic organisation like it should never be allowed to consolidate such power over the information we can access. It's beyond insanity that we let it get this far, given what we know from our experience of the dying systems that offered information to the masses via TV and Press.
The only filter we need on information is our own free minds!
I haven't proofed this post so forgive me if the grammar and spelling is off which I'm sure it will be.
Edit: OK I lied I fixed some of the really stupid errors but there will be more for sure.
P.S. Mozilla could also add support for NameCoin so we can decentralise the current DNS system!
Because of the already set dominance of the big engines. It is difficult to get into a market with an established product. Making a good product or even a better one is not enough most of the times. It is not about the cost of developing it . The only reason Bing has some share is because it is forcing it self on the novice user, Baidu because they did what google did just in China and DDG because it offered privacy and got the privacy-aware user base. Where would mozilla enter in such an environment?
I am not comparing them to google. I am comparing them to the alternatives. What can a mozilla search provide more that DDG cannot? DDG still provides, anonymity, it has a good search algorithm without having to use tracking, parts of it are open and often supports open source projects. What could mozilla bring to the table compared to that? If there are any innovations that mozilla can bring on, it makes more sense to put them forth by cooperating with companies like DDG than to try and make their own product. Unless such innovations are so revolutionary that a new product is justified. But you cannot talk about that theoretical. There must be an actual idea present.
Yeah but the extra revenues are still coming from their agreements with other search engines. They will be competing with them as well not only google.
Already having the dominating engine is a big difference. But the reason for Chrome success was also its performance, google marketing, an ok dev kit and the fact that it is an open source project that allowed them to catch up to firefox pretty quick.
From what i know former Firefox developers made Chrome that were hired by Google. Chromium is open source. If there was blatantly stolen code from Firefox Mozilla could sue them. What portion of code did they steal? Also what part are they keeping secret on the browser?Even the tracking algorithm is open source.
Only if you can make an engine with a serious market share. Otherwise it would fail and endanger the broswer´s market share.
You will have to compete with that strategy. Amoral but it works.
I would love if that was enough but it is not that simple. If that was the case everyone would ditch Win10 as well. But the process is always a longer one and many times not only affected by the quality of the product you are offering. Jumping to offer a search engine without thinking of the other factors could easily lead to a failure like Firefox OS. And the OS did did not affect the sustainability of the company. thus there is space to fail and try.
Then i misunderstood. I thought your premise was for the search engine to filter the news.
When you have bad journalist you demand and support the better ones. Just as if your doctor is not doing his/her job right you ask for a better doctor, you do not have the Pharmacist do the Doctor´s job.
Journalist ethics very well define what is good journalism and what is not. The fact that most mainstream news outlets are corrupt as hell does not cancel out the significance of the job. If anything it make it even more necessary.
Our ¨free¨ minds do not have the capacity to process and filter all the information out there. That is exactly the reason why ¨fake news¨ are so effective nowadays. Because we cannot do this on our own and the typical filters that we used to trust are completely untrustworthy. We just need better, trustworthy filters. We need better journalists that actually follow the ethics of their profession.
That sounds rather defeatist and short sighted. A better more initiative product always has a chance to turn the tables and move a market forward.
As I understand it the "core" is propitiatory so Mozilla would have an advantage with an open code base. DDG uses sites like wikipedia as an authoritative source (fake-news springs to mind - it's full of dis info etc.) and they are partnered with other search providers. Which to my mind isn't optimal if one of the objects is decentralisation (which it should be imho).
In my experience the best innovations are bourne out of practicality as challenges arise and/or understanding increases/changes perceptions. The best environment for that tends to be within active development. Granted some theoretical seeds is required to set the spark. I'm sure a brain storming session would result in ideas worthy of exploration.
If it were open people could fork and create search results and indexes far more refined for their target audience and different countries/regions could create their own services free of google and American political influence etc.
I have no idea about developing a search engine but I'm pretty sure their are people within that area of expertise that would have some cool ideas about how to do things better or differently. If those people don't exist it would be very strange, because they have always desisted in projects I have worked on. There aren't many places for those people to go to to develop their ideas. An open development platform would offer them an outlet plus people from other fields could provide input and who knows what fruit that could result in?
Playing the short game isn't really that smart and that mentality is how the monkey trap works. Some times you have to lose a little in order to gain greater things.
If Mozilla developed a search engine they would have an advantage over google. They will be starting with a clean slate and they can implement new ways of tackling the issue with the benefit of what we know today.
OK stolen may have been a bit harsh. They effectively did a Logan and shafted the community and ran off with the ball. It was dirty however it's dressed up imho.
If Mozilla play the game as you're presenting it they could lose what they have regardless. The whole Chrome thing had a serious impact on FF. That could easily happen again in the future and they may not get off so lightly next time.
The engine wouldn't need to dominate from day one and to attempt that would be insane. It's growth would be modest to start and then grow organically over time. Part of that growing process would lead to new innovations. If they found the magic ingredient it could easily turn the market on its head over night.
It's not the only way and people are growing tired of that type of shit.
The thing is they tried to create the OS maybe it would have been more profitable to go for the search engine market which has potentially high returns. If they could break into that market they would have money to invest in other funky projects.
I guessed that was the case.
Not when the outlets are in the hands of so few and those same people have a shared agenda. Modern Journalists a nothing more than prostitutes willing to write any crap to please the John paying them. And it's not even what they write quite often it's what none of them dare to mention that's vital news.
Have too laugh at you Dr analogy Doctors are big pharma's drug pushers and best avoided. The medical professions are in the top ten for causes of premature death.
They may pay lip service to a code of ethics but it's meaningless unless their actions demonstrate that they observe them! That's the whole problem these days people say one thing and do another and there is no personal accountability.
Speak for yourself. There are simple ways to process information independently. You can determine if some one is full of BS pretty quickly when you know what to look for.
But that's a whole new topic.
Well you wont get those better journalists without a free and open browser that serves up unadulterated results! And the wheels are in motion to close things down to a point where the same old hands are pulling the strings, and showing you exactly what they want you to see.
We need strategies right now to fend of what's coming down the pipe because our window of opportunity is closing.
I think we will have to agree to disagree as I have a feeling neither of us is going to alter our position. Thanks for taking the time to give a thoughtful reply.
