Hacker News Reader

Comment by dtx1 | Hacker News Reader

Money is not the Problem with firefox https://preview.redd.it/r9q69xop8n6d1.png?auto=webp&s=59a1d3...

This diagram should be zero-aligned at the very least.

This is misleading. Firefox does not have a CEO, Mozilla does. The Mozilla CEO/chairperson is responsible for many more projects than just increasing the market share of Firefox — whether nerds on Hacker News think that’s what Mozilla should be doing or not is another conversation.

Sure, but their main project still is Firefox, by far. That's the project that has the most impact too. How successful are they with their side projects, anyways?

> That's the project that has the most impact too.

How do you measure impact? If it's income created for Mozilla Corp then I agree it's impactful too, and the CEO's pay does seem justified.

> How successful are they with their side projects, anyways?

Honestly I don't know, I haven't looked at their latest annual report. I do pay for Mozilla VPN, although I'm not a Firefox user.

$75 million per year from subscriptions and ads, according to their latest report (2022 for some reason). Another commenter did some quick math to try to prove that donations were fruitless and found that Firefox could reasonably expect to replace that revenue with a donation box:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40901664

So in other words: the side projects aren't successful enough to justify not accepting donations.

I'm not opposed to a donation box at all, I'd donate myself even though I don't use Firefox.

So what else is it that she did do so amazingly well?

According to this comment† from the very same post on Reddit:

> [Mozilla] in 2018's cash flow was negative ~1 million dollars while in 2022 it actually profited ~167 million.

A reply to that comment‡ states the following:

> Also important is that if you look at their annual reports, while it's still the most significant revenue source, the percentage of revenue coming from search engine royalties (i.e. Google) has been steadily going downwards. Instead revenues from their other services (VPN, Pocket, etc) had been increasing steadily.

And indeed we can verify those numbers on Wikipediaᵃ, where we see "Revenue derived from Google" trending downward every year.

So it seems she's been A) successful with continuing the search engine deal with Google; and B) increasing revenue from their other services (VPN, Pocket, etc.) so that Google's contribution to the revenue pie chart slowly shrinks over time.

† https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1dg7ejv/co...

‡ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1dg7ejv/co...

ᵃ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances

Reply on news.ycombinator.com