Mozilla increased revenue significantly in 2021 – Ghacks
Mozilla published its annual audited financial statement for the year 2021, and the outlook could not be better.
The organization managed to increase total revenue to $600 million, an increase of more than $100 million compared to the year 2020. Search engine royalties, especially paid by Google but also other search engine companies, increased by more than $80 million in the year to $527 million.
While that is impressive growth, subscription and advertising revenue grew even more. Last year, Mozilla earned $24 million from subscriptions and advertising. In 2021, revenue grew to $56 million.
Mozilla’s main revenue sources grew considerably. In fact, 2021’s revenue is second only to 2019’s revenue, but only because of a one-time payment Mozilla received in the year from Yahoo.
The organization managed to reduce expenses significantly in 2021 next to that. Total expenses were $339 million in 2021, a reduction of more than $100 million when compared to 2020’s $438 million.
Software development expenses were reduced from $242 million to $199 million, general and administrative expenses from $137 million to $81 million, and branding and marketing from $37 million to $30 million.
Taken together, Mozilla managed to increase its net assets by almost $200 million to $1.164 million in 2021.
Revenue depends to a large degree on search engine deals. While revenue from subscriptions and advertising is growing faster, it still makes up only a small amount of Mozilla’s total revenue.
About 87% of Mozilla’s total revenue comes from royalties. The organization renewed its search engine contract with Google in 2020 for three years. Details were not disclosed and since Firefox’s user base seems to stagnate, it could be that Mozilla got better rates from Google. There are other possibilities, including more searching activity by Firefox users.
Subscription and advertising revenue grew by 133% in 2021. Information about individual services is not provided in the financial statement. Mozilla established several services in the past couple of years, including Firefox VPN, Pocket Premium and Hits, Firefox Relay and others. Advertising revenue is included in the section as well.
Mozilla managed to increase revenue by over $100 million in 2021. The 20.97% increase in revenue can be attributed to the new 2020 search engine deal with Google, and Mozilla’s focus on increasing subscription and advertising revenue.
The organization is still dependent on search engine deals, and it looks as if this is not going to change anytime soon. The dependency is reduced every year though, and newly established services such as Firefox Relay Premium, may accelerate the trend in the coming years.
The search engine contract with Google ends in 2023 and there is a good chance that it will be renewed again in that year.
Mozilla’s future is looking bright, financially.
You can check out the financial report for 2021 here.
Now You: do you use other Mozilla services, besides Firefox?
Yeah, they are still super dependent on Google.
And it’s fun when people write bullshits like “Mozilla means freedom, they are independent!”
Nope. One small move and Google can turn off the lights…
But good think Mozilla started to diversify. Sooner or later (or even it’s already in progress), they will sold our data to survive, but it’s normal
> And it’s fun when people write bullshits like “Mozilla means freedom, they are independent!”
Your comment is “bullshit”, to use your own words. They are independent. They have a contract with Google which means: Google pays money to be the default search engine in Firefox. End of the whole story.
> Nope. One small move and Google can turn off the lights…
Nonsense. Google can’t turn off Mozilla’s lights. Mozilla has financial reserves for a few years and even if Google wouldn’t be interestered anymore (and there is no signal that this would happen anytime soon) then there are still other search engines that would love to take this chance. Sure, probably for less money, but still for money.
> Sooner or later (or even it’s already in progress), they will sold our data to survive, but it’s normal
And now it becomes completely absurd.
@Tom:
You sound like you’re form r/firefox on Reddit. They’ll all vehemently deny that Mozilla survives on Google Money.
@Jody Thornton
> About 87% of Mozilla’s total revenue comes from royalties. The organization renewed its search engine contract with Google in 2020 for three years.
> They are independent.
LOL, no comment.
Add to this baseless claims of a non-profit organization supposedly having loads of reserves when they already had to announce substantial layoffs due to financial difficulties. Further, some baseless claim that other search engines would be interest in Firefox’s address bar when all competitors basically know that users would switch that back to Google anyway hahahaha. Also, this guy does not believe that the alternative to the Google revenue is Firefox selling services to users where they have the ability to compromise user privacy (e.g. VPN).
* [Editor: removed]
@Tom,
How did you you become so indoctrinated? Did you do it to yourself or others did it to you?
Things are not as black and white as you imagine. Mozilla is Google’s lapdog, they exist because Google pays them for their users’ data. Essentially Mozilla and Firefox exist because Google allows them to.
Firefox is almost dead (and it’s a good thing), so they are no competition to Google.
Google need a non-Chromium browser out there to damp down talk of monopoly in that arena.
Considering the general purposes to be used, to release a new engine is not as easy as it seems, however it should be a good idea to rebuilt Google with some kind of 100% backwards compatibility with all kind of browsing requirements. By the way the User Agents are no longer “needed” or also are too old in their environment (i.e., what’s is Mozilla 5.0?).
> By the way the User Agents are no longer “needed” or also are too old in their environment (i.e., what’s is Mozilla 5.0?).
User agents will always be needed – for backward compatibility reasons. “Mozilla 5.0” is not the version number of the browser. The user agent of Firefox 107, for example, is:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:107.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/107.0
“Mozilla 5.0” has to be there for compatibility reasons, it’s used by *every* browser. Please use Google or another search engine to find the history behind this. You will find explanations that are better than my explanation would be.
@Tom, user agents can be spoofed and anyway websites can detect the real browser UA.
Time to merge with ugly g
I’m more curious about how many users they’re losing annually to other browsers. Any statistics about that?
Apparently not that many: https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
But still losing users, which is good, Firefox should die ASAP.
Wonder how many employees Mozilla will cut after this and how much more of a bonus the CEO will take for herself.
> About 87% of Mozilla’s total revenue comes from royalties.
> They are independent.
* [Editor: removed]
Mozilla is doing its best, not easy to balance. Happy their revenue increased for period 2021, hoping maybe naively that one day they’ll be able to make it without Google : there must be a way to achieve this when so much money is potentially available, to do it without any compensation that is which seriously reduces the spectrum. Personally I like Mozilla, its philosophy, its efforts, its browser.
By the way, to answer the article’s question : I use none of Mozilla’s other services simply because I have no use for them or because I already use comparable services.
Whether we like/use or not Mozilla products, its browser to start with, I’m emphasizing on the idea that it participates as others to competition and whether I’d like/love/adore/worship Google products I wouldn’t wish any company’s monopole now and in the future.
Very well stated, I share the same sentiments.
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Ghacks is a technology news blog that was founded in 2005 by Martin Brinkmann. It has since then become one of the most popular tech news sites on the Internet with five authors and regular contributions from freelance writers.