They pour a ton of money into events like SXSW. They had huge displays of their new branding up and down Congress Ave a couple of years ago, with several other "brand awareness" things going on throughout the conference.

I don't want to second-guess the marketing team, as I clearly don't know all of the things I'd need to know to do that.

But let me second-guess the marketing team: wouldn't all that money be better spent marketing to potential customers rather than things like SXSW?

Actually, given the current demographics of SXSW, that probably IS good marketing to potential customers. SXSW now costs quite a bit and is often a hipster corporate management perk. That sounds like a good demographic for Mozilla to market to.

Lone gone are the days where SXSW was a bunch of grubby hippies listening to a bunch of crappy bands. Now it's a bunch of hipster drones listening to a bunch of crappy mainstream pop artists.

> That sounds like a good demographic for Mozilla to market to.

Why does that sound like a good demographic? Sure, cover that group, but not at the expense of the much, much larger demographic of "ordinary people".

That demographic can cut you checks with 7 digits or more.

"Ordinary people" earn you nothing unless you vacuum up their personal information.

Firefox users don't cut checks, though. What Firefox needs is a much larger number of users. How wealthy they are isn't terribly relevant.

I've seen firefox ads in the subway in Paris. Mozilla is absolutely paying big bucks for marketing.