Re: "Backed by the non-profit that puts people first"
Reading just a single revenue number from a long report can be quite misleading, especially considering that a large chunk of Mozilla's revenues comes from a single source: royalties for search engine revenue from Google.
Apparently according to the report "Receivables from that one customer represented 64% and 69% of the December 31, 2022 and 2021 outstanding receivables, respectively'. The customer wasn't mentioned by name in the report, but I think it's pretty obvious that this refers to Google.
We don't know what happens behind the scenes that caused Google to be paying Mozilla less and less every year. Maybe there's a lot of users that switched from Google to some other privacy search engines or other browser, or maybe Mozilla/Google changed how the royalty rates are calculated. The terms of contract for the search engine deal isn't public AFAIK. But looking at past reports, (search engine) royalty revenues seems to have been stagnant, some years increasing some decreasing but this year's decrease isn't too out of ordinary. What is clear is the portion of Google's revenue is steadily clearly decreasing year over year, so presumably they're diversifying here too.
And it's been Mozilla's long term goal to reduce their dependence on Google revenue, and apparently this year their "Subscription and advertising revenue" (i.e. revenue from Mozilla VPN, Pocket, and sponsored content in the New Tab page) increased from $56m to $75m, which is about 33% more. I think that's a fairly healthy growth.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
