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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."
Do you not see the irony in this statement, posted to this site....
"'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.
Yes it is. 50% of 100 million is 50 million, 100% of 100 million is 100 million, and 300% of 100 million is 300 million. "Of" in this context means multiplied by.
Perhaps you're confused by "300% of" as opposed to "increased 300%"? - it's a 200% increase, or 300% of the original value.
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?
Oh come on. Even Apple only supports OS/X for blatantly self serving purposes.
No "number was revealed. "What you're referring to is speculation from a well respected reporter based on what she heard from her sources. Neither Google nor Mozilla have confirmed it.
Mozilla is open about pretty much everything you can imagine. The only two areas where we are not totally transparent are some employment issues and business dealings where our partners would not partner with us if we tried to force transparency on them.
Mozilla does release financials every year so you can see what revenue we generated and where we spent it. That makes it sort of possible to see what specific deals look like in broad terms but no matter how much we'd like to, we simply can't force transparency on other companies.
I doubt that. Most likely, Google created Chrome and its specific features to push the browser market in a direction that favored web-based replacements for desktop application -- you'll note that, in addition to advertisements, Google sells both its own web-based services and a hosting platform for third-party web-based services, and has consistently used Chrome to push technologies designed to address barriers to web services displacing traditional desktop apps (and also on enabling new kinds of web apps besides areas where desktop apps are popular.) JavaScript performance was the big area that was a focus when Chrome was launched, though the focus has moved somewhat from JavaScript performance as such to support for a broader range of APIs that push into non-traditional web roles (e.g., WebGL) and non-JavaScript application options (particularly Native Client), but still largely focus on browser-as-app platform.
Google created Chrome to push Google's (current and planned) revenue-generating services, but that's more than just advertising, and I would say that Chrome exists disproportionately to push Google's non-advertising services (though, of course, it doesn't miss the easy opportunity to directly push Google advertising, either.)
At the prior funding level, (100 million per year) Google accounted for nearly 100% or Mozilla.org's budget.
This story is about Google getting suckered in a bidding war to the the default (but NOT the only) search engine in the top-bar. Anyone can change the default at any time. The agreement is performance based, capped at 300 mil. If Firefox search hits falls they won't make the full 300 mil.
So if prior agreement paid 100% of development costs, and if Firefox can keep its market share up, they should have three times their development budget to add astounding new features, fix up their physical infrastructure and harden their browser and plugins. They now can afford the manpower. The ball is in their court.
I'm pretty sure Google isn't worried about Chrome market share here. They get the advertising dollars either way.
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