And, for the foreseeable future at least, advertising is a key commercial engine of the internet, and the most efficient way to ensure the majority of content remains free and accessible to as many people as possible.
I’m afraid they aren’t wrong. The majority of people aren’t going to pay for access to random blogs etc. So we’d end up with only the big players having usable sites.
People kick off about ads but rarely suggest an alternative to funding the internet.
Back in the day ads were targeted based on the website’s target audience not the user’s personal data. It works fine but is less effective. Don’t see why they couldn’t go that way.
Internet was fine in the early 2000s before the rise of social media platforms resulted in surveillance advertisement complex.
It was a different place, but worked ok.
More effective is a massive understatement. Now they can precisely measure effectiveness and adjust their strategy in real time to maximize output. They have increased effective effectiveness several fold. The cat is out of the bag, even if we try to roll this back the googles of the world know the data is there and can’t not harvest it. Our best strategy has to combine regulation and monopoly busting, break these companies into smaller ones that have less power to comb through big data.
For a good read on this, check out The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuniga.
rockbottom: NOBODY wants to see the ads you throw in our faces. doesnt matter that, as you claim, those ad views pay you for your content. there is no good way to make those ads palatable.
It is time to fork Firefox. Mozilla has bern hijacked by people who don’t care about its vision.
Wow, utterly shocked that a company with a shit CEO that takes most of its money from Google would have these viewpoints.
I’m sure it is completely coincidental that ublock is about to die as well.
I think the bigger issue is them potentially losing their Google income.
They’ve failed to diversify their income with a bunch of failed subscription services, Google is in hot waters because of anti-competitive behaviour; they’re going to need something.
Which isn’t to say I like it. But “this is happening because they take Google money” is parroted beneath every slightly negative thing Mozilla does.
I don’t see how they think it’s a good move. I’m not speaking about people being upset. Most of the Firefox users are either people having at least some tech knowledge or people which use it because of a person with some tech knowledge.
And most of these people use an ad-blocker, know how to install a fork and so on. So, from the beginning, I don’t know who think it’s a good idea other than to kill Firefox.
Can one thing please not be full of adverts :( I’ll pay for the browser, I just want marketers to fuck off for a while lol
Did I miss something? I don’t think the browser is going to be full of ads?
Not that they’ve announced yet, I just meant more broadly I am very sick of advertising and adverts
Mozilla actually has (had?) ads in Firefox, right on its default start page.
You can easily turn them off in settings
Opt-out can never be the right answer.
Right and that has existed long before today. And I can’t find anything in this article suggesting that the start page, or anywhere else, is going to be reallocated towards new ads which is what it sounds like the commenter above me was suggesting.
Realistically, I don’t think so either. Pessimistically, I give it until Jan 1st, 2030.
Your pessimism is more optimistic than my optimism
My problem with this in spite of the dire situation they face if Google is forced to cut funding by anti-trust court rulings (or not even forced but they make paying off Mozilla a moot point so they stop) is that they become an ad company. Ads become tied to their CEO compensation, to the salaries of the people who develop it.
They claim they’re making a better kind of ad network, a privacy respecting kind. The problem is the ad industry doesn’t want less data, they want more. There are no looming laws that would force the ad industry to adopt a more privacy respecting alternative or die and without that the ad industry is going to shun this and it’ll be a failure and then they’ll have a failed ad network that they can either discard entirely or adapt to industry standards of privacy invasion and abuse and continue to exist and then they’ll make another “hard choices” post about having to do that.
And I can see it now. This experiment will fail and after some pressure from the ad industry and some devil-on-shoulder whispering Mozilla will begrudgingly start to enshittify. Their ad network will become less privacy respecting by tiny little steps, by salami-slicing or boiling the frog, the whole privacy-preserving measurement thing will be thrown out BUT they’ll still claim they respect you more than Google and will at first perhaps but that will erode. Maybe they’ll just implode at some point after that which given Google is being found a monopoly works just fine for Google and the rest of big tech who want a more centralized, locked down browser company that wants to help implement DRM that can’t be circumvented, that wants to help lock down everything on the web to restrict users freedoms to choose what is displayed or if they can save it or record it or copy it to say nothing of blocking ads.
I used to work in a marketing agency, and had a few clients that heavily used advertising data.
I’d go as far as to say that while more data is nice, good data is much better. If Mozilla can somehow produce an advertising platform that is not intrusive, is opt-in, and has a wide enough reach to satisfy advertisers, they’re on to a winning strategy. Furthermore, they would need to codify any changes into Mozilla itself to ensure that advertising never gets to intrude on privacy or the browser experience - with the removal of the CEO and entire exec team as the cost for triggering this.
With all that said, I think the threat of doing this is probably a good thing. Mozilla’s track record of products is, frankly, piss poor. The thing is, everyone seems to be good at advertising, so there’s no reason why if Google leaves they can’t just say “fine, we’re an advertising company now” and eat their lunch.
I don’t see how eating their lunch would happen. Something like 85-90% of Mozilla’s income every year is from their Google search partnership. Google does some sort of revenue sharing thing where a portion of the value of search ads clicked through Firefox goes back to Mozilla, but the payment for search partnership itself, well, if that goes away, there’s no lunch to eat, metaphorically. There’s nothing to replace it with. Maybe Bing takes it’s place but I’m not sure that would happen.
I think the elephant in the room here is that Mozilla has 0.2% of the revenue that Google has, but is sustaining market share orders of magnitude higher than that. But unfortunately, at this point there’s a growing echo chamber of extremely low effort comments assuming that if you could just run back the clock, and not focus on “distractions” like their VPN or Mozilla.social, or the Mr. Robot Easter egg, that they would have overtaken Chrome in market share.
Like it was this easily achievable thing that just slipped through their fingers, rather than an inevitable consequence of Google’s disproportionate finances and monopoly power.
It’s probably more on the lines of Google losing advertising share to every other company (Meta, Amazon, Unity, Microsoft) that has gotten into the ad business in recent years - all with minimal experience in ads, but either data, infrastructure, or visitors to sell. Mozilla definitely will have the infrastructure and visitors, even if opt-in.
I don’t agree that they’ll overtake Google, or could have overtaken Chrome with their product tie-ins/offerings. Google is a beast, whereas the average person probably couldn’t tell you who makes Firefox (or maybe even what Firefox is).
I kept giving Mozilla the benefit of the doubt and telling myself things weren’t so bad.
I was wrong.
I’ll continue using Firefox because it’s the least bad option, but I can’t advocate for it in good faith anymore, and I don’t expect it to last long with this orientation.
So it goes.
I’m afraid it won’t last long without it. That’s the key problem.
People hate ads, as do I, but what’s the alternative?
Ok sure, what do you want them to do instead then? 80% of their income is reliant on a tech giant’s grace and is seemingly more and more likely to be cutoff soon. They need to survive somehow, and every monetised service they tried flopped thusfar.
What makes you think that developing a free web browser needs to grant anyone any income?
Do you think developers don’t have to eat? or pay rent? And donations alone do not cut it.
Being a developer myself (with no ads in his software), I don’t think you understand my point. The software I write in my free time does not pay my bills. That’s why I also have an actual job.
You are aware that there are full-time developers working at Mozilla, yes? Developing a browser is not a hobby-project that you can pull off with some volunteers in their free time. You need professionals that work on such a giant project with their full attention.
Developing Firefox is their job. And of course they want to get paid for that (and deserve it). Just like you get paid for your actual job.
(and deserve it)
Please enlighten me: how do they deserve to be paid for a non-profit product?
Non profit means their earnings must match their expenses or be used to actually improve the product/service, not that they earn nothing at all
How does someone deserve to be paid for work done? Is that your question?
Is this some kind of pathetic troll attempt?
I will not reward that with further attention.
Non-profit doesn’t mean that there’s no employees. They’re still organizations that have a cash flow, seek to raise funds, and employ people to serve their mission. Most non-profits have paid employees.
I could see them trying to take themselves away from Google which wouldn’t be a bad thing as that’s where most of the money comes from for them … Unless that’s changed recently…
So long as they remain open source
Mozilla’s non-profit status needs to be revoked.
I think at this point they have a nonprofit and a company, the later being used for all their taxable income.
I know; they should not be allowed to do that.
This breaks my heart.
At this point, I don’t see many other options to keep everything going for Firefox. If they somehow lose the go*gle money they use to keep themselves going, they need another revenue source and I severely doubt there are enough Firefox users willing to pay enough to keep it going as it currently does. Don’t like it, but I’m gonna at least play devil’s advocate.
It would be nice if they at least allowed for even being able to donate to the browser itself. All the options that I am aware of are either the paid extra stuff they have, or to the overall company. Which is annoying since I imagine that the current “donation” option means that the money is being used mostly for the upper execs and routed to the extra shit that already has options for paying subs.
They could try not having an overinflated budget?
I don’t know a thing about their budget, so I’m not qualified to make any comments about how good or bad they are doing at managing it or make any comments.
Where would you cut?
I mean I don’t love it, but I’m also not sure what the argument is supposed to be about how this ties to browser market share. Mozilla made $593 million from their most recently released financials. The CEO made $6.9 million. My calculator tells me that’s 1.16%.
So is the argument that Mozilla that if they set the CEO salary to $0, used it all on more developers, that would spin up a browser experience that’s so improved it would lead to more market share? A 1% change in Mozilla’s spending will bring them to 50% market share? 40%? 20%?
What’s the cause and effect here? Do we even actually know that that’s true, that it even has anything whatsoever to do with development choices at all? I get that the CEO is an easy target but I think assuming that is explaining market share ignores things like Google’s dominance of search and ads, and how those piles of cash drive initiatives like Android and Chromebooks, which helps propel Chrome to dominant market share. Those are the drivers of market share. I don’t even think people have even tried to begin to think through this argument in real terms, it’s just a lot of knee-jerk reaction to news stories disconnected from any specific idea of cause and effect.
The CEO is for a good reason an easy target: Show me another company where this level of incompetence is rewarded with steady salary increases?!? (I am afraid you’ll be able to. ;-))
Given your calculation is correct, you are correct that paying the CEO nothing would not make a big difference for Mozillas income. Although it would hopefully open the road for a better CEO.
Your argument that hitting at the CEO ignores the whole context of market dominance of Google could IMHO also used against your argument: If the CEO is so powerless that she cannot take the responsibility for the decline of Mozilla, than why does she get payed at all. If all is a function of the environment and the tides of the market, we can easily replace her with ChatGPT and have the same results w/o wasting money.
At the end of the day, we are exactly where we have been literally a decade ago: Finding a sustainable business model for Mozilla/Firefox. Once more: This core problem of Mozilla/Firefox has been well known for over a decade by now, and again the CEOs only answer is advertisement. Why do we pay money for the bullshit every first semester MBA student would come up with a brainstorming within the first 3 minutes.
Mozilla survives thanks to Google and their (rightful) fears of being outed as a monopoly.
The discussion is always if Mozilla could survive on donations. I do not now if they could. I still think there are a lot of actors with an interest of an independent browser, even whole governments. What I know for sure is, I won’t donate to Mozilla as long as incompetent CEOs are payed.
So it looks like the CEO of mozilla is bleeding firefox to pad his salary. Thats disappointing. Are we sure firefox wasn’t simply taken over by a private-equity firm?
It’s 1.16%. I don’t love it but claiming it’s bleeding them to death is, I think, not what we’re looking at. I think they just recognize their exposure because any given year 80 to 90% of the revenue is coming from their agreement with Google, and they’re screwed if they can’t diversify their income a bit more.
Time to switch to other fork
What if we could have a world that wasn’t powered by ads? I’d like to get past this “only one way to run the internet” train of thought.
I’m just so tired of ads, commercials and advertising in general. It’s exhausting.
I think the ad model is fine as long as adblockers work. Only a small percent uses them and the normies without can watch the ads so the service stays free. Perhaps a bit egoistical but works for me! 😅
It’s either that, a subscription model of some sort, going to pay to install models, or something else to fund themselves. I’d suggest going to a donation based model, but I doubt there’s enough Firefox users willing to pay to even be able to keep it alive more than a year or two tops.
Universal Basic Income, ala star trek, is an option, then just let everybody make cool shit.
Star Trek has no Universal Basic Income. It has replicators for all your basic needs.
Replicators, which are universal and basic.
Well, do you subscribe to news sites, YouTube Premium, Kagi? The world you dream of is available to you today
Actually, I do. I have a YouTube Premium subscription and subscriptions for two news sites. And on top of that a ton of Patreon subscriptions and offline memberships. I am the one who
knockspays.Even of they reduced everything down to just Firefox, Thunderbird, and all in infra to run those products (Mozilla accounts, addons stores, hosting, dev/build services…), as well as continuing to pay for dev time on open source they use/contribute to, and the time their employees put into w3c and other foundation/standards/steering initiatives, I don’t think you’d want to see the cost of a monthly subscription.
This stuff costs way more than people think it does, and behind the scenes Mozilla does a lot of work (with google, Microsoft, apple) on web standards, and trust me, you want them still involved seeing as each other browser group involved is well… You know… Much worse for privacy generally.
YouTube premium and kagi aren’t even remotely in the same league for comparison when it comes to the cost and value a “Firefox” or “Mozilla” subscription would be.
Right, I think people forget that Opera used to be funded by a subscription. But they had to move away from it because it just didn’t work. I think the golden age of Opera was shortly after they dropped that. And I dearly miss Opera as they were before they switched over to Chromium.
I think the history of early to mid Opera is the perfect example of actually wise and interesting and innovative software choices. They were in very early on things like browser extensions, and they had incredible innovations like Opera Unite, Opera Turbo, and all kinds of incredible customization. But I suppose in some ways they’re also a chilling tale of what could happen, because I’m pretty sure they sold to a Chinese company, switched to developing on Chromium, and seem to have abandoned the ethos of innovating. I know that some of the original developers from Opera went on to create Vivaldi but that too is based on Chromium.
Was never much of an opera user, but I have enjoyed vivaldi quite a bit. I don’t see myself using vivaldi due to the chromium aspect. I used to keep it around for the random chrome-only sites but that’s way too uncommom nowadays.
Lately safari/gnome web (i.e. WebKit engine) have gotten good enough to be my pwa installer browser depending on my OS, though i really hope firefox re-implements PWA support sooner than later.
Hey, Laura. Fuck you. Fuck your profits and your corporate greed. Enshit yourself till you close down.
