The financial report for 2020 was released today by the Mozilla Foundation. For the first time this year, Mozilla provided us with more recent data, but this gives us a good picture of the organization's financial health from a year ago.
It is no secret that Mozilla went through a number of difficult years, with major layoffs in 2020 as it restructured its for-profit arm. Despite a number of technical improvements, the flagship Firefox browser is struggling in the marketplace. In 2020, the revenue from its search partnerships was $466 million, which was driven by its search deal with Google. The same amount of money was generated from these sources in 2019.
The organization expects revenue to be over $500 million in 2011.
In today's announcement, the executives noted that the new products are slowly but surely starting to pay off. The revenue increase for the service was 450% from 2020 to 2021.
In 2020, the lion's share of Mozilla's revenue came from its search deal with Google. For all intents and purposes, Mozilla is still dependent on Google for the time being.
The only way for Mozilla to decrease its reliance on a search deal with a company that is both a competitor and a dominant browser is to Diversify its revenue sources.
Mitchell Baker, CEO and chairwoman of the Mozilla Foundation, writes in today's announcement that the foundation has been exploring new and responsible ways to monetize that align with their values and set them apart. The deprecation of cookies and a reckoning of the online advertising industry was needed. We are in a position to navigate the industry toward a new model of responsible advertising that respects people while delivering value to companies. We are building a business for the future by building products for the future.
Mozilla needs more users to adopt its services, whether that is its browser or its virtual private network. There is a window for a non-Chrome browser, with users increasingly skeptical about the motives of both Microsoft and Google. Mozilla's efforts to bring sponsored suggestions and ads to Firefox haven't necessarily endeared the organization to its own users.
