Firefox developer Mozilla plans to launch its next premium service next month according to information published by Sören Hentzschel on his blog. The service, MDN Plus, extends the free MDN Web Docs resource for developers.
Mozilla's main source of income comes from its main competitor in the browser space, Google. The agreement between Mozilla and Google ends next year, and it is not clear if both parties will renew the agreement. While Mozilla does have a few options in the case the renewal should fall through, it has changed its strategy in regards to revenue generation in recent years.
In 2020, Mozilla earned $496 million in revenue, a slight increase of $6 million when compared to 2019 if you ignore a one-time payment Mozilla received in that year. The bulk of the revenue came from search engine deals; agreements to make a specific search engine the default in the Firefox web browser. A total of $441 million was contributed by search engine deals.
Revenue from other services, mostly subscription-based services, rose from $14 million in 2019 to $24 million in 2020. Mozilla did launch additional products, including Firefox Relay Premium and Mozilla VPN, which will likely increase the overall revenue from subscription-based services going forward.
Hentzschel reports that Mozilla may launch the new MDN Plus service as early as March of 2022. Mozilla did test MDN Plus in Summer of 2021 and revealed after the test period that it had plans to launch MDN Plus in the future to the public.
According to Hentzschel's information, Mozilla could launch the service on March 9, 2022 in select countries, including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Italy, France, and some other countries.
The subscription-based service will offer in-depth technology articles from experts and additional features to improve MDN Web Docs usage, including offline usage, personal collections, change notifications, or theming options. The price may be $10 per month or $100 per year according to Hentzschel's information.
Closing Words
Mozilla needs to diversify its revenue stream to reduce the dependence on search engine deals. Subscription-based revenue is on the rise and the creation of new services will certainly contribute to the overall revenue, provided that services are not dropped in the future.
It will be interesting to see how well these services did in 2021 compared to 2020.
Now You: do you use one of Mozilla's premium services?
Sources:
https://www.soeren-hentzschel.at/mdn/exklusiv-mdn-plus/
https://www.ghacks.net/2022/02/21/mdn-plus-mozilla-plans-to-launch-premium-developer-service/
- kkwong7878, DKT27 and Karlston
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