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Did Microsoft Make Google Pay Triple Rate To Mozilla?
SharkLaser writes "Last week it was announced that Google has renewed their search deal with Mozilla. The amount Google paid to Mozilla was surprising: $300 million per year, despite the slightly falling market share of Firefox. Many took this as charity, and for the purpose of advancing the web. Now sources in the bidding process have revealed that Google's main rival in the bid was Microsoft's Bing, along with Yahoo. This bidding war was costly to Google, which is now paying 300% of what they used to, just to be Firefox's default search provider. Mozilla veteran Asa Dotzler is also giving insight into the deal between Google and Mozilla. 'Google started out as a search company. But that's not what they are today. Google's primary business is advertising. Google brought in $9.7B in revenues in Q3'11. 96% of that revenue was from ad sales. Not all traffic to Google ads is 'organic' though. To help drive ad sales, Google pays for traffic to their ads. They paid out $2.21 billion, or 24% of their ad revenues in 'Traffic Acquisition Costs.' That money goes to revenue shares with their AdSense partners and to 'distribution partners' — presumably browser makers, PC OEMs, and mobile OEMs and operators.' Google also pays shareware and freeware distributors to bundle Chrome and Google toolbar with their programs and games."
No, you're the product.
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"'Google started out as a search company. But that's not what they are today. Google's primary business is advertising."
Funny, I thought they were always an advertising company. The last time it wasn't, to my knowledge, was when it was still hosted at Stanford.
Chrome helps Google display ads by directing users to Google services, such as with searches in the address bar.
And thanks to this deal, Firefox does as well. Chrome and Firefox are competitors, but Google only created Chrome for pushing ads. They don't care if the user seeing the ad is using Chrome, Firefox, IE, or Safari. The user seeing the ad and clicking the ad is all that matters to them. So really they aren't very serious competitors of Mozilla (not saying the competition isn't a serious deal, but that Google doesn't want to seriously compete against them).
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
Who is the post supposed to be a shill for? How is pointing out that Microsoft's support for rival OS' is more likely to be for regulatory purposes than interest in users in any way dubious? Most here know the history of MS Office on the Mac, of MS support within OS/2 being deliberately broken by changes in Windows 3.11? Of sabotage against DR-DOS and other rival systems? Why should we believe Microsoft supports Mac OS/X for anything but blatantly self-serving reasons, when the customers have been trodden on time and again?
Google's policy of "Do No Evil" is, at best, dubious. I like Google a lot but I would never claim that they are above reproach. Nor should anyone. They have grown at a fantastic rate, to the point where their share price has been known to dip whenever they exceed official revenue expectations by a smaller factor than usual. I'm willing to accept that their initial growth was merely through cost-effective engineering, but their applications have a high degree of tie-in and Google certainly leverages one to get traction with another. The chances of there being anti-trust potential should not be ignored and the chances that they're covering themselves (rather than their users) are not insignificant. We should take the possibility seriously.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It would be interesting to know if this were true, not as a percentage of the market but in terms of total volume (number of users, number of searches done using Firefox, ie something actually somewhat relevant to how Google derives revenue).
People seem to focus a lot on market share but I think it's a largely irrelevant metric for doing anything other than cheerleading. After all, you can apparently run a viable business based on a single digit browser market share. Given the astonishingly large number of people using the web this shouldn't be surprising but people seem to look at the percentages and forget the volume.
300 million sounds like a lot of money (because it is!) but it would seem to be less than a dollar per Firefox user per year. Would Google expect to derive more than a dollars worth of revenue per user over a year on average? It doesn't sound like a fundamentally unreasonable proposition (and Google should have the metrics to know, it would not be much of a gamble for them).
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