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Mozilla Raking in Millions?
truthsearch writes "Internetnews.com wonders about the money Firefox is making in revenue thanks to Google. From the article: 'Mozilla gets paid a publicly undisclosed amount for each Google search query made from Firefox by a user.' This revenue is used to pay the recently formed Mozilla Corporation's 40 full-time equivalent employees and fund project and infrastructure development."
But is this really sustainable in the long run? That seems to be a lot of money.
I guess its a stupid question - seems to be a win-win situation at the outset - though google paying firefox seems more "dont be evil" driven than bottom-line minded. I mean even if they didn't pay, what were the chances that it wasn't going to be google up there?
Do they also get $ from searches on ebay, amazon, or yahoo (which are also listed on the toolbar)?
They don't have much choice...Microsoft had essentially destryed "direct" market by driving browsers price to zero. And they need _some_ ways to fund their development.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Lets do some basic math and see how the numbers add up.
... but still A LOT MONEY !!
- Of the 100 million downloads lets say 20% are daily/active users -> 20 2illion users.
- Of the 20 million daily users, lets says 20% do make at least 1 search query. -> 4 million queries/day.
- If google pays around 0.02c a query. They get 80k/day x 30 days = 3.2Mil x 12 months =~ 38 Mil right there. A conservative number
Firefox has been mentionned based on their search bars, a while ago the German version of Firefox was said to have "spyware"
There is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men. -- Boondock Saints
Safari has Apple. Internet Explorer has Microsoft. Firefox has Google. All 3 companies have the resources to fund development of their free browsers.
Opera is the stand out -- in the rain. Opera has Opera Software, but Opera Software is a tiny 230-person company. Unless the anti-establishment mavericks in tech communities like SlashDot aggressively support Opera by buying commercial Opera-Software products, Opera just might disappear, being squeezed to death by the big 3 browers: Safari, Internet Explorer, Firefox.
Having used Internet Explore, Firefox, and Opera, I can swear that Opera is the fastest, most compact browser for the Windows environment. I hope that the best-marketed product (i.e. either Internet Explorer or Firefox) will not extinguish the technically best product (i.e. Opera). Still, business history has not been kind to the technically best products: e.g., DEC's Alpha processor and Sony's Betamax.
It implies they have more motivation to market, to exaggerate their features, to astroturf even. And I wonder if they are - they appear to have an unreasonable amount of support on sites like this for how good their browser actually is.
I am trolling
So now I'm on Opera 9.0TP2 and enjoying it. 84 MB of memory used after 12 days of Opera running, God knows how many tabs opened and closed and how many sites (incl. Flash and videos) visited. And I currently have 18 tabs open. *AND* it's a technical preview (not even beta software).
The biggest insult added to injury was the "it's not a memory leak, it's a feature!" attitude from Mozilla.
I don't plan on switching back to Firefox, ever.
heres how much i make a month just from search alone
53,846 @ 3,557clicks = $261.67
now thats per month and im a small publisher
firefox probably gets that many searches every minute!
also they pay up to $1 for every person who downloads firefox from a referal from my site
!!
My real question is where all this money goes, I had the, maybe stupid, idea that the Mozilla foundation was non for profit, hence all the money they make is to pay their employees and invest. Now, if they make real money out of it, I would be a little bit pissed off, since I donated money to advertise their product, I mean if they have that much money, they can sure do some advertisement, can't they? I'm not saying I'm ennoyed I gave money, but when I see that : "# What is the purpose of this site? As a small, non-profit organization, the Mozilla Foundation has very limited resources at its disposal to market Firefox to the world. SpreadFirefox was created to fill this void, and was founded on the same principles of community involvement that drive the development and testing of Firefox. We believe there is nothing that a large community of enthusiastic volunteers can't accomplish, and this site exists to unite the community into one cohesive marketing force that even competitors with unlimited resources can't compete with. For more information, see our original announcement." And then I hear about all these arrangements, it sounds to me like their limited ressources are not that limited, so I understand it's not Mozilla directly, but spread firefox in this instance, but it sounds like a lot of bs suddendly.
Mozilla's Chinese division does have a deal with Yahoo!, although they may change this to Google now that Google has a Chinese version of Google hosted in China. I'm willing to bet Yahoo! pays Mozilla for this partnership, much like Google does.
It's pretty interesting. It's a long shot enough a Search Engine making that much money, let alone them having enough to hand out to their favourite Web Browser.
EpiAdv - if you like Pokey the Penguin, try this comic!
-- When I talk about a lot of swap, I'm talking about 800-1000MB. If that isn't high, then tell me what is.
How much money does slashdot make from all the advertising?
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
Look at the biggest names in Open Source, they all have some income generating stream somewhere. If this is how Mozilla drums up money for FF than more power to them as it's the least intrusive money making scheme i've seen in software yet. (Compare to banner ads for instance)
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore