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."

Comments

Who else is contributing?

[RLiegh]

Do they also get $ from searches on ebay, amazon, or yahoo (which are also listed on the toolbar)?

Re:Phase 2?

[sznupi]

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.

How much ?

[nocloo]

Lets do some basic math and see how the numbers add up.

- 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 ... but still A LOT MONEY !!

This isn't the first time

[The Hobo]

Firefox has been mentionned based on their search bars, a while ago the German version of Firefox was said to have "spyware"

Re:Thats not too small!

[sirnuke]

Google has the same system for Opera, which leads me to conclude they want Opera and Firefox to be the top browsers (which wouldn't be a bad situation, if you ask me).

Judging by how little I use Google's front page any more, I am guessing that the future of search engines is through the browser's search bar. Should the day come where the world is dominated by Mozilla and Opera, it would be very hard for any other search engine to buy into the "put me first in your browser's search bar" setup when Google already has 4 years of paying Opera/Mozilla for just that.

Google is probably quite aware they will lose their power in the search field if they treat users as a commodity. The fact that Google makes sense as the default search engine now won't make a difference in 4+ years.

Re:Google = "Rich Sugar Daddy"?

[babbling]

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.

Do we care? Opera could have been Firefox if they had GPLed it. Mozilla saw their opportunity and now they're benefiting from their foresight.

Opera could become an open source (as in "freedom") company any time they want, and they'd instantly see a jump in the number of people using their browser, because suddenly it would be included in Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu, and so on. Instead they've decided to sell (via a third party) closed-source browsers for mobiles. Good for them, and if they ever decide to put the big "GPL" stamp on their software, then they can count on a sudden jump in the number of people using their software. You can only get that jump with GPL, though.

Re:Spend some of that on disable-output-escaping?

[Anonymous Coward]

They can also spend it on fixing memory leaks. Spinning the issue is not fixing the issue. I'm about to switch to Opera if FF doesnt get their act together.

I've already done that. I can live without a couple of extensions I used in Fx (it's hard, but I managed), but I can't live with the memory leaks. One day, I accidentaly left Fx running since morning, with just Slashdot open in one tab. When I got home that night, Fx was up to 870 megabytes of memory usage... That's far from nice, given that I have 512 MB RAM in my PC and can't upgrade it because of i815 chipset limitation.

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.

they are making a fortune. FACT

[wwmedia]

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

!!

Re:they are making a fortune. FACT

[Ciaran_H]

I believe that disclosing how your site is performing in that way is against the Google AdSense Terms and Conditions (see clause 7). You can give the total amount of payment, but you've also given the number of clicks you get, which the T&Cs disallow.

Good for FF...

[Churla]

One thing many people on the internet have yet to embrace is a simple fact. Everybody needs to survive, and in our world that means income. Period. Even the open source software we love so much has to earn itself a living somehow else it will always be a distant "when I get spare time i look at it" stepchild, or a "I'm doing this to get my name known" project which is apt to have it's best developers move onto paying gigs.

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)