[AceJohnny2]

> Then they would let people contribute money to the browser

People keep saying things like this, but the truth is that direct contributions to any ad-supported system contribute more like 1%-10% (at best) of their income.

You are not the majority you think you are.

[nine_k]

It does not have to be the majority. It would suffice to produce enough funds to continue developing Firefox, with full-time engineers, infrastructure, etc.

The whole Mozilla foundation budget oscillated around $100-120M/y for last few years. Let's assume that half of it was dedicated to Firefox; e.g. $60M/y. It would take 500k users paying $120/y (aka $10/mo) to support their favorite browser. The current audience of Firefox is approx. 170M users; it would take about 0.3 percent of the audience to be paying users; 0.6% if you lower the rate to $5/mo.

This is how any freemium works.

Even more funnily, someone with a good reputation could just start an organization to accept the payments and direct them to Mozilla developers, both Mozilla employees and significant open-source contributors. Eventually the developers might stop needing the paycheck from Mozilla, and thus from Google.

[buzer]

> The whole Mozilla foundation budget oscillated around $100-120M/y for last few years.

Firefox is under corporation, not foundation. Mozilla Corporation expenses are $400M+, not $100M.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances

(I don't enough knowledge about freemium economics to figure out if the stated numbers would work out or not)

[nine_k]

Thank you for the correction!

If we adjust to these numbers, we need to quadruple the number of paying users, up to some 1.2% of the total user base. Let's add a safety margin, and bump it to 2%.

Still does not look impossible to attain.

[ac29]

> someone with a good reputation could just start an organization to accept the payments and direct them to Mozilla developers, both Mozilla employees and significant open-source contributors

I had the same thought. I dont think such an org would be able to pull in nearly the same amount of money as Mozilla does, but even a few million dollars a year would fund a lot of development work.

[dropofwill]

Spotify makes over 80% of revenue off of paid subscribers, even though over 60% of users are on the free, ad-supported subscription.

Now that's not some optional donation scheme, there are real tangible benefits to being a paid subscriber, so idk how that could fit into something like Firefox.

[eviks]

Is Mozilla that rich that it can ignore a 10% bump in income?