For a non-profit organization, the Mozilla Foundation is doing pretty well financially, better than many for-profit web companies are doing these days. The organization has released some financial details for 2008, saying that revenue has reached $79 million percent in the last year, up five percent from the previous one. It’s not exactly clear why it would release the numbers in November 2009, but what is clear is that revenue growth is slowing down after revenue increased by 12 percent from 2006 to 2007.
“Our revenue and expenses are consistent with 2007, showing steady growth. Mozilla’s consolidated reported revenues (Mozilla Foundation and all subsidiaries) for 2008 were $78.6 million, up approximately 5% from 2007 reported revenues of $75.1 million. The majority of this revenue is generated from the search functionality in Mozilla Firefox from organizations such as Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, and others,” Mozilla Foundation chairwoman Mitchell Baker said in her annual “state of Mozilla” letter.
Firefox has had a good year in 2008, so this isn’t the reason for the slow down, rather the organization has seen some pretty heavy losses at its investment portfolio. The Mozilla Foundation lost about $7.8 million on long-term investments, about 25 percent of the portfolio’s worth. Exclud… (read more)