TECH: More than 85% of Mozilla revenues still come from Google.

The year 2021 is draw­ing to a close, and it is time for the big Inter­net com­pa­nies to take out the bal­ance sheets… for the year 2020. Mozil­la yes­ter­day shared with the pub­lic its finan­cial report for last year and unveils its strat­e­gy: to diver­si­fy its sources of income to make itself less depen­dent on Google.

Today, Google large­ly dom­i­nates the web brows­ing mar­ket with its Chrome brows­er, but also thanks to its high-per­for­mance search sys­tem, which many com­peti­tors, includ­ing Mozil­la for Fire­fox, use through lucra­tive partnerships.

Sta­ble income thanks to Google

In a large finan­cial report pre­pared by an inde­pen­dent audit firm, Mozil­la shares with us its rev­enues for the year 2020. We see sta­ble rev­enues for Mozil­la Cor­po­ra­tion (the busi­ness branch) com­pared to 2019, with some 466 mil­lion euros. $ 465 mil­lion in rev­enue, up from $ 465 mil­lion in 2019. The prob­lem is, more than 85% of that rev­enue, accord­ing to the report, comes from the online search part­ner­ship with Google. Mozil­la is there­fore extreme­ly depen­dent on the Amer­i­can giant in terms of finance and operation.

But Mozil­la has no real choice but to part­ner with Google today, a com­peti­tor in the search engine mar­ket and, above all, dia­met­ri­cal­ly opposed to it on the phi­los­o­phy con­cern­ing data, both the ecosys­tem. is both clogged and dom­i­nat­ed, again, by Chromi­um browsers. Accord­ing to Stat­counter, in 2020, on com­put­ers, the Chrome brows­er was used by 65.5% of users, while Fire­fox, Mozil­la’s brows­er, was only 4.3%.

Mozil­la pre­dicts that 2021 will bring it $ 500 mil­lion, in part thanks to a sharp increase in rev­enues from its new prod­ucts, Relay, Pock­et and the VPN service.

These prod­ucts are at the heart of the 2022 strat­e­gy for Mozil­la. Whether Relay, the email address pro­tec­tion ser­vice which recent­ly saw the arrival of a more com­plete paid offer; Pock­et, which allows you to save what­ev­er you want from the web in a library that you can access when­ev­er you want; or its VPN ser­vice, Mozil­la intends to increase their effi­cien­cy and their image to attract new paid sub­scrip­tions that would help diver­si­fy sources of income.

The VPN ser­vice is per­haps the most promis­ing, with, accord­ing to Mozil­la, a 450% increase in rev­enue expect­ed between 2020 and 2021. The goal for this end of the year is to bring the rev­enue share of these ser­vices at 14% of Mozil­la Cor­po­ra­tion’s total revenue.