But then again, what's the alternative for Mozilla? In case of YouTube Premium we've clearly seen that even HN software engineers, demanding six figure pay, will refuse to pay other software companies a few bucks for their engineering work.
Where does Mozilla find funding to sustain itself elsewhere?
The problem is, Mozilla is full of NGO types who don't care about the browser, and use the money stream to fund pet projects. If the spigot gets shut off, they don't care, they'll jump ship to some other non profit and will keep "making the world a better place" there. Meanwhile the entire internet will be worse off because of it.
Even at a 5% interest rate, the $500M that Google has given Mozilla over the years would be returning $25M p.a. That can fund quite a few six figure salaries, indefinitely, while maintaining independence.
"In 2006, the Mozilla Corporation generated $66.8 million in revenue and $19.8 million in expenses, with 85% of that revenue coming from Google for "assigning [Google] as the browser's default search engine, and for click-throughs on ads placed on the ensuing search results pages."
Sources linked there like [0], albeit quite old now, mention only the corporation and not the foundation.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2011/12/5/2612918/future-of-firefox...
The problem is compounded by the fact that all the released financial and audit reports seem to "consolidate" the flow of money between the foundation (non-profit parent company) and the corporation (for-profit owned subsidiary). So it's just seen as income, and we have no idea how accounting-wise they get the money, and how it presumably "flows out" to the foundation. Who knows how much "licensing costs" the corporation pays the foundation as a way of extracting the money up.
E.g.:
https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-202...
"All significant intercompany accounts and transactions have been eliminated."
We know they are paying large sums to the top executives. Is the corporation paying this or the foundation? You cannot donate to the corporation so maybe the donations alone (without google money) is enough for their expenses. It's more consufing because if I am not mistaken the top execs of the corp are also top execs of the foundation. Regardless, since one owns the other, they probably have legal ways to move money around. Excluding the people who are actually trying to build a browser, the whole organization is super suspect. As far as I know they never respond to criticism either.
The classic example being Thunderbird.
Free YouTube: You can watch with ads and you are tracked.
YouTube Premium: You can watch without ads but you're still tracked.
YouTube with an Ad Blocker: You can watch without ads and without being tracked.
Google's largest chunk of revenue comes from ads. Being tracked simply means you'll be shown targeted ads in other areas apart from YouTube if you pay them. They shouldn't charge you and still sell your data.
But that's not the problem. YouTube premium simply isn't worth €168/year to me (I don't use it enough) and they'll still track me anyway wherever other people are using google analytics. I have a newspaper subscription to support local journalism and it is the same deal: the site is full of ads and just as bad as the free stuff, except I can see all the articles.
I use Firefox, though.
IMHO it's way more valuable than something like Netflix or Spotify since Youtube is not just brain-rot and entertainment, but a source of so much educational stuff on tech, math and programming, music, independent news reporting, fitness, dancing, finances, mindfulness, cooking, DIY, car and household repair tutorials, etc, so I'm curios why you would think it's not worth the money when you literally couldn't get videos on all those things anywhere else for any amount of money let alone for free(ads).
For example if I go now on Youtube, besides the usual clickbait brain rot, there's small creators from my country explaining various topics of interest on subjects from the nation's high-school final exams(equivalent to the US SAT, UK GCSE or French Baccalaureate) far better than the underpaid and unmotivated teachers usually do at class. Complex stuff on maths, physics, organic chemistry, CS, biology all explained for dummies in the local language based on what's gonna be at the exams. Sure it's the creators that are putting the effort, but Youtube made it frictionless and accessible to everyone in exchange for ads. I would have killed for such a thing to be wildly available when I was in school, and now it's for free on Youtube for all schoolkids to enjoy.
In fairness though, it's actually very hard. Try inventing a new tech product that generates 200-400m in revenue, that others could not easily replicate.
Say you'd have 0.5B at your disposal and a few hundred people. You likely can't do it.
I have and will keep financially supporting software I find useful. However, I do agree that it's questionable whether you can easily replace Google as a source of funding.
If you watch YouTube you presumably find it useful too?
Also, what about content creators? They get paid off the money Google gets from YouTube.
Classic monopolistic behaviour.
You can't have your cake and eat it, Google neither and they will get what's coming but this is not the battle to pick, they do far worse than put ads on a video sharing platform
There's always SOMETHING that's morally unacceptable to people who want it for free - I bet even full, total, complete submissions to whims of such community would not result in any significant revenue.
Reminds me of the crypto controversy of 2 years back. Mozilla had been allowing crypto donations for as long as they existed.
But then some important ex-employee "rediscovered" this, virtue signaled on Twitter how wildly inappropriate this is and formed a mob powerful enough to make Mozilla take the bow and close crypto donations.
And now? Well, now there won't be crypto donations. The same amount of crypto is mined, just none of it donated to Mozilla. You've achieved less than nothing, but you did the virtuous thing. Whilst simultaneously being funded by Google, with a laundry list of ethical violations, but those "don't count".
The problem is they want it both ways: they want to give it out for free, but with annoying ads, but then they get mad when people don't look at the ads.
Where I live, people regularly stand on the street in busy pedestrian areas and hand out free packets of tissues with a piece of paper on top advertising some business. These businesses aren't clamoring for laws or some technical means to force people to look at the ads closely; people routinely take the tissues, toss out the ad, and use the tissues, and it's ok. But according to many, many HN users with stockholm syndrome, not reading these ads closely and just trashing them is somehow "stealing", because that tissue took resources and a factory to make.
They aren't tracking your eyes and pause the video if you aren't watching the screen. Not saying they wouldn't do that if it was feasible...
They are annoyed that you are actively preventing them from playing out the ads in the first place, and they offered an alternative, to pay for not having the ads, at what is in my opinion a very reasonable price concidering the vast array of content you have access to on YouTube.
So they are effectively making the implicit contract explicit. Watch with ads or pay for no ads, otherwise you can happily choose to not use YouTube.
If you really think hosting video is cheap, make an alternative to YouTube.