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Google Paying for Firefox Installs
slashkitty writes "Google updated their AdSense service to pay publishers for referrals. What's interesting is that now they pay publishers $1 US for each FireFox download with the Google Toolbar installed. Is this the bump that Firefox needs to boost downloads? Will Google be able to pay the millions for all the downloads?"
It seems to me that when posting a story like this, at least one of the links should lead to something that actually discusses the subject of the article.
p y?answer=27406&ctx=en:search&query=firefox&topic=0 &type=f
Here is a link to the actual section of the Google AdSense FAQ that mentions the dollar per Firefox install:
http://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.
Also, Google currently has over 7.5 billion dollars in the bank, so yeah, they could pay one dollar for EVERY PERSON ON EARTH to install Firefox and not go broke.
The suggestion that Google might not be able to "pay for all those downloads" is absolutely rediculous. If there are 10 million Firefox downloads, and Google is paying $1 each, that's basically little more than a rounding error in Google's financial statements. You can check them out at the SEC if you don't believe me. Those numbers are in thousands. As in, Google has cash or marketable securities in the area of 2.1 billion dollars. 10 million is practically rounding error. Google's balance sheet is here: at the SEC
Statistically speaking, there's a 99.998% chance that my IQ is higher than yours. Get over it.
Emphasis mine.
This implies that if a user's computer has ever had Firefox installed before, it's ineligible for a referral. Also note "up to" a buck, which implies many users (I'd guess users outside of the United States, but it's not stated anywhere I can readily find) will yield less.
Edit: Found some fine print, where it explicity states the PC must never have had Firefox installed before, regardless of the presence or absence of the Google Toolbar. I imagine a LOT of folks have downloaded Firefox, played with it, then uninstalled it, which means AdSense users don't get kickbacks.
I've put up a link on my site regardless, but I'm not expecting BIG CASH PRIZES.
Goog£e
Wow, that's fucking awful. Please don't ever do that again.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Actually, AdSense is the program where they pay _you_. AdWords is the program where you pay them.
And exactly how is the Firefox API more open than the IE API? True, we have access to the source code, but exploiting that degree of freedom would only lead to splintering and incompatibilities. If we (rightly) restrict ourselves to the available, published and supported APIs please explain where Firefox has an advantage. I see quite a few plugins and add-ons for IE. In fact, an argument can be made that the IE API is *too* open, which has enabled many exploits.
Regarding the web-based OS: A web browser *MUST* be limited in what it exposes to application developers or else developers of malware will exploit them. Think about it -- much of the power of a PC comes from applications interacting - sharing data in the file system -- having access to the *SAME* data in the file system. Do you want any random web page to have access to your files? No, the only way to prevent that is to lock down the APIs, thus crippling the very applications you think $oogle is contemplating.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
Internet Explorer 7 beta now has tabbed browsing, a search bar, one button to errase all privacy data, ... Search google, look at some screenshots. It's almost a copy of firefox. I liked it's functionality even better. It's dirty, but will people care when they get it automatically installed at their computers?
In the heady days of '98 and '99, MSN and AOL would pay the PC vendor a nice big bounty fo $10-20 if you signed up with them. But since them microsoft took over the ISP signup process and tried to take the money for themselves, which caused no end of controversy.
I dont know what the current status is, but I know this: the bounty is back. Not from sites like webvan, boo and whoever else used to pay kickbacks to the OEM for signing up to their web site, but just the search engine.
As an aside, if Sun wanted Java preinstalled on all machines, they only had to offer a bounty too. Now that google are prepared to pay, Maybe boxes with firefox+toolbar+java will become standard.
My Google AdSense referral page does not include any reference to the Firefox referral program.
It seems they are limiting it to sites in USA or in English (just guessing).
What's great about the Google toolbar in Firefox is just how configurable it is. I've only kept a couple of buttons from it on the left side of my menubar. Really, if this were bundled with Firefox, it would seem harmless enough to not bother me. What I like about Google is that they didn't force Firefox users to display the toolbar in some sort of a monolithic way. It's just as configurable as all the UI elements that come standard with Firefox.
I use Google toolbar for the form spellchecker and also for the ability to search for keywords in my GMail emails. The GMail integration is a killer feature.
Stock Market 101: The market cap has absolutely nothing to do with how much cash a company has on hand. The only time a company gets money from stock is when it sells a block, other than that, the price of its stock has no impact on it.
He may not, but I do:
http://www.live.com/
> I'm sure Google is completely innocent of spyware
The price for the toolbar with pagerank is spyware. Google is a data-mining company, not a charity. Its in the TOS.
Thanks for the comment - glad you substantially agree.
:-) They could also build it into say, froogle, gmail, etc.
> done in more of an AJAX style
Unfortunately, AJAX, while useful:
(a) isn't responsive enough
(b) is not rich enough.
(c) doesn't have deep enough access to local resources (eg: local drag and drop, copy and paste, vision and voice input processing, spellchecker and grammer checker processing,)
(d) require a total rewrite (perhaps innovative automated MFC/Swing -> HTML translation libraries can help)
(e) depends totally on network access (no ability to work disconnected)
That's why XPCOM would be better - users aren't willing to sacrifice all this current functionality just for network-backed storage.
However google can proceed to write (say) a way to automatically translate openoffice display primitives (eg: combobox, list selection) to HTML and provide that functionality over the web. (It may even be faster on some machines, given how slow openoffice is compared to MS Office
For eg: I could go to froogle, search for something, copy/ paste a table comparing vendors for that item into a gmail _as a embedded spreadsheet_, forward that to my boss who sort the _copy_ of the data using the spreadsheet function (the live Froogle data itself may have changed), and approves something for purchase. This could be scripted (on Google's servers) with OpenOffice Basic
There is already a option to run OpenOffice inside Firefox using the npsoplugin.dll
Now if they'd integrate it a bit more, make it possible to save documents to Google servers over WebDAV or such (Base, Gmail or whatever)...