this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024
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My problem with this in spite of the dire situation they face if Google is forced to cut funding by anti-trust court rulings (or not even forced but they make paying off Mozilla a moot point so they stop) is that they become an ad company. Ads become tied to their CEO compensation, to the salaries of the people who develop it.
They claim they're making a better kind of ad network, a privacy respecting kind. The problem is the ad industry doesn't want less data, they want more. There are no looming laws that would force the ad industry to adopt a more privacy respecting alternative or die and without that the ad industry is going to shun this and it'll be a failure and then they'll have a failed ad network that they can either discard entirely or adapt to industry standards of privacy invasion and abuse and continue to exist and then they'll make another "hard choices" post about having to do that.
And I can see it now. This experiment will fail and after some pressure from the ad industry and some devil-on-shoulder whispering Mozilla will begrudgingly start to enshittify. Their ad network will become less privacy respecting by tiny little steps, by salami-slicing or boiling the frog, the whole privacy-preserving measurement thing will be thrown out BUT they'll still claim they respect you more than Google and will at first perhaps but that will erode. Maybe they'll just implode at some point after that which given Google is being found a monopoly works just fine for Google and the rest of big tech who want a more centralized, locked down browser company that wants to help implement DRM that can't be circumvented, that wants to help lock down everything on the web to restrict users freedoms to choose what is displayed or if they can save it or record it or copy it to say nothing of blocking ads.
I used to work in a marketing agency, and had a few clients that heavily used advertising data.
I'd go as far as to say that while more data is nice, good data is much better. If Mozilla can somehow produce an advertising platform that is not intrusive, is opt-in, and has a wide enough reach to satisfy advertisers, they're on to a winning strategy. Furthermore, they would need to codify any changes into Mozilla itself to ensure that advertising never gets to intrude on privacy or the browser experience - with the removal of the CEO and entire exec team as the cost for triggering this.
With all that said, I think the threat of doing this is probably a good thing. Mozilla's track record of products is, frankly, piss poor. The thing is, everyone seems to be good at advertising, so there's no reason why if Google leaves they can't just say "fine, we're an advertising company now" and eat their lunch.
I don't see how eating their lunch would happen. Something like 85-90% of Mozilla's income every year is from their Google search partnership. Google does some sort of revenue sharing thing where a portion of the value of search ads clicked through Firefox goes back to Mozilla, but the payment for search partnership itself, well, if that goes away, there's no lunch to eat, metaphorically. There's nothing to replace it with. Maybe Bing takes it's place but I'm not sure that would happen.
I think the elephant in the room here is that Mozilla has 0.2% of the revenue that Google has, but is sustaining market share orders of magnitude higher than that. But unfortunately, at this point there's a growing echo chamber of extremely low effort comments assuming that if you could just run back the clock, and not focus on "distractions" like their VPN or Mozilla.social, or the Mr. Robot Easter egg, that they would have overtaken Chrome in market share.
Like it was this easily achievable thing that just slipped through their fingers, rather than an inevitable consequence of Google's disproportionate finances and monopoly power.
It's probably more on the lines of Google losing advertising share to every other company (Meta, Amazon, Unity, Microsoft) that has gotten into the ad business in recent years - all with minimal experience in ads, but either data, infrastructure, or visitors to sell. Mozilla definitely will have the infrastructure and visitors, even if opt-in.
I don't agree that they'll overtake Google, or could have overtaken Chrome with their product tie-ins/offerings. Google is a beast, whereas the average person probably couldn't tell you who makes Firefox (or maybe even what Firefox is).
I would say you're basically right. I think Mozilla can try to grab a slice of the pie, the Q is if it's enough, and fast enough, to replace revenue from the search partnership.