Some days ago Chris Beard, CEO of the foundation: Mozilla announced that the company is moving towards the implementation of a premium offering backed by the Firefox browser, which is planned to be released at the end of this year.
This idea to offer a premium offer by Mozilla is to propose a series of additional functionalities compared to the basic browser and accessible through a «Premium» subscription.
According to the statements of the CEO of the foundation, the paid offer is designed to give users access to additional services such as cloud storage or VPN features. The basic browser remains free and the user is free to add additional options for paying an invoice.
“We are working on three revenue streams and we want to rebalance them: we already have research and content components. For example, in terms of the content component, we trust Pocket, which helps to discover and manage sponsored content. And the third that we've been looking at while thinking about products and services is adding premium subscription plans.
“We also tested the VPN. We can determine if you are on a public Wi-Fi network and remind us to use a VPN when we find out that you are in the process of banking online. “We want to add more subscription plans to our suite of services and focus more on the end-user relationship, which is expected to offer more resilience tools in online business management
However, Internet users think Mozilla might be too ambitious in offering the functionalities that can be accessed through a subscription.
Mozilla seeks new ways of financing
The new service is expected to launch in October And as Chris Beard points out, it would include a free feature, and users will be encouraged to update it once it's finished.
And it is that with this new market that Mozilla is targeting, you can see how the company has to deal with the eternal problem of financing the Mozilla Foundation.
So far, the company has implemented resolution approaches that are at first glance incompatible with its values.
In fact, at the end of the first month of the previous year, the foundation announced its intention to start showing sponsored content on Firefox, a repeat of the 2014 approach, to diversify its revenue streams.
Mozilla eventually implemented sponsored tiles within Firefox 60 to achieve this goal.
But the willingness to offer advertising ended up sending a confusing message to users., as Firefox is recognized as a privacy-focused browser and seen as one of the biggest promoters of ad blocking, user tracking, among other things.
At the end of 2015, the foundation gave up on its project, however, without closing the door to advertising in Firefox.
The foundation was unable to develop a winning strategy (in their view) until the 2017 acquisition of Pocket, a tool for saving online content for future reference.
Chris Beard on rebalancing revenue streams for Mozilla, Apart from the sponsored content, it takes into account Mozilla's dependence on Google, which we should try to highlight, especially that the relationship with the company is difficult, due to its main competition, which is Chrome.
Since in fact, at least 90% of the foundation's income comes from organizations like Google for listing their search engines in Firefox. It remains to be seen if these paid services will be successful when it launches at the end of the year.
Finally, several users on the network have commented on this Mozilla plan to try to monetize its services and that this may be a consequence of the company going through difficult times in terms of revenue and this may denote something worse with the passage of weather.