New sources of revenue sought: Mozilla invests in open source AI and advertising

The Mozilla Foundation has announced that it will invest in privacy-compliant advertising and open-source AI applications. This was announced by President Mark Surman on the Mozilla blog. The aim is to find new sources of revenue while manifesting the mission of an accessible internet in new ways. Nevertheless, Firefox remains Mozilla's core product, which needs to be strengthened. As part of this realignment, there have also been changes at management level.

Mozilla hopes to make quick money through advertising

Mozilla hopes to achieve short-term sales growth by investing in privacy-compliant advertising. To this end, the Mozilla Corporation acquired the advertising analysis company Anonym last year. The aim is to reduce the tracking of users in the advertising industry. Instead, the advertising company analyzes the characteristics of website visitors and their personal information separately. The aim is to generate relevant results for advertising customers without being able to draw conclusions about the respective users.

The development of a trustworthy open source AI is intended to ensure Mozilla's technical relevance in the medium term. "We need to defend what's good about the web and steer both the technology and the business models of the AI era in a better direction," writes Surman. After cutting almost 100 jobs last year, the Mozilla Foundation wants to launch new fundraising campaigns to attract new supporters in the long term.

New management council to coordinate Mozilla organizations

The Mozilla Foundation has also set up a management council comprising the top decision-makers of the individual Mozilla organizations. Its purpose is to better organize and coordinate the work between the individual departments. Members include Jane Silber (Mozilla.ai), Laura Chambers (Mozilla Corporation), Mohamed Nanabhay (Mozilla Ventures), Nabiha Syed (Mozilla Foundation), Ryan Sipes (MZLA/Thunderbird) and Mark Surman. As Mozilla President, he will take over as Chairman of the Management Board.

Currently, Silber and Chambers are only interim CEOs of their organizations. Mozilla plans to fill the positions on a long-term basis by the end of the year. Last year, Chambers had already taken over the position from Mitchell Baker, who has now also relinquished her positions as chair and board member of the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation. President Surman thanked her for her commitment in the Mozilla blog.

Nicole Wong replaced Baker as Chairman of the Mozilla Foundation. She has been a board member for eight years and previously held management positions at Google and Twitter. After two years on the board of the Mozilla Corporation, Kerry Cooper will step into the position of Chairwoman. There was also a change at Mozilla.ai, where Raffi Krikorian took over as Chairman of the Board. He is CTO of the philanthropic investment company Emerson Collective and previously worked in development teams at Twitter and Uber.

In addition to paid subscriptions for VPN and bookmark services, Mozilla has so far been financed by license fees from Google. The Mountain View-based company pays for the status of its search engine as the default setting in the Firefox browser. According to figures from Statcounter, Firefox has a global market share of around 2.5 percent, well behind Google's own Chrome browser, which accounts for two thirds of the market. In Germany, around one in ten internet users uses Mozilla Firefox, while more than half use Google Chrome.

(sfe)