Mozilla is run by a nonprofit and just lost 80% of its revenue from the Google ad antitrust case. How is your using their browser making them any money? That's literally the rub here. The whole promise of Firefox is that they don't data mine your activities like chromium browsers do and data mining and ads would be the way to make revenue anywhere near on par with what was lost. The CEO gets paid the same either way out of the billion or so that Mozilla has in financial reserve. Firefox keeps losing user base yet the CEO pay keeps going up.
sinceasdf
joined 2 years ago
That's very optimistic. Mozilla is not in good shape and the c suite may simply ride their paychecks from the endowment off into the sunset.
Yeah you're correct the deal was cut off late last year so it was not renewed for 2025 but it was on the radar for a couple years. It's why the sudden sketchy rush for other sources of income so they can keep going as normal. I did make an edit to my post and changed 'comes' to 'has come'.
It's been set up to fail. Over 80% of their revenue was from that deal and Google could likely dictate whatever they wanted as part of it. That income is the only thing that even allowed for such an insane pay package for their c-suite in the first place, and so the current form of Mozilla is a direct result of all that cash. It's supposed to be a nonprofit and now they're basically in withdrawal because they cannot afford their insane"normal tech company leadership" salaries.
Idk how Mozilla survives this without another sugar daddy, the leadership pay looks like the biggest liability killing the company and they have to willingly give it up before the company goes bankrupt and/or becomes another ad machine.
I would really love for them to drop pocket and all their other stupid shit and just make a browser like they used to. Even just that is a huge undertaking these days though, and that is because of (again) Google's ability to basically dictate web standards. They strung Mozilla along as a pet "look we're not a monopoly" competitor while continuously raising the bar to entry for any competition. I think the antitrust case should have gone after web standards to allow for competition rather than basically cutting off the only real competitor, but that would have been harder to do and the actual case was based specifically on Google's search and ad monopoly rather than the chromium browser monopoly.
Most of their income has come directly from Google, the incumbent browser monopoly. I'm full tin foil hat on this one, Google is pulling the strings here.
Idk the CEOs $6mil salary sounds more like malice to me
? It's a well established strategy. I'm not speculating, this is how social media marketing works. You can find all sorts of resources on how marketers strategize about these things.
This has gotten quite pedantic but being paid is not a requirement, just is most often how it's done:
Advertising (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/advertising) 1: the action of calling something to the attention of the public especially by paid announcements
I'm not trying to tell you how to post, genuine recommendations are the only form of advertising I respect. But it is advertising and companies have every incentive to astroturf that.
Sorry, I meant nothing towards anyone in particular, just mostly want to point out the strong likelihood companies are posting here. It's a when, not an if. The bigger Lemmy gets the more money there is to be made here.
Well sure it is. I mean nonpaid advertising is the best kind for everyone since it's likely to actually be honest and actually listened to but it's not always easy to tell from some comments what their true motivations are. Thus the existence of astroturfing.
Kagi probably has a social media manager or hires a marketing agency (as most companies do) and their time would be well spent posting on Lemmy (and other sites) about Kagi but in as organically of a way as possible since we're all pretty ad averse here. I mean, it's possible Kagi specifically isn't doing it, but it is a matter of when, not if, companies start doing that here.
I tend to be suspicious of any brand name dropping. It's where most reddit advertising happens too.
The only factors keeping guerilla advertising off Lemmy are its relative obscurity and maybe association with less advertising-friendly instances (which afaik are mostly defederated from the biggest instances). We aren't immune to astroturfing by a longshot.
In the case of Kagi, the degooglers are basically their market. Here is probably one of the best places to reach an audience since it's basically people fleeing similar tech bro overreach from reddit.
I think Kagi is fine btw but I also think knowing that we're just as if not more susceptible to this kind of marketing is important to keep in mind for the health of the fediverse.
Not trying to say there is no organic discussion, but I would be shocked if they were ignoring this avenue for getting the word out. It's basically free advertising and advertising is generally expensive.
I mean the idea is to appear organic, it's not very effective advertising otherwise. It's free real estate there is no reason they would not be doing it.
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As of 2023 Mozilla had over 1.3 billion dollars in reserve (thanks Google!). This is not over yet, but it will be drained pretty quickly if they keep treating a nonprofit like a typical silicon valley tech company.