Mozilla makes millions through Google searches
Sunday, 12. March 2006, 13:31:54
Internet shopping for information, home appliances, cars, clothes, records, and books is fueling the spectacular growth of the Mozilla open source software foundation and its signature product the Firefox browser. According to an Internet Week report, Mozilla gained a reported $72M of revenue in 2005 from click through searches on Google via the Firefox browser. By comparison, Opera had $23M in total revenues in 2005 according to its public financial report.
Mozilla's Revenues
The revenue number for Mozilla is in some dispute, but a spokesman for Mozilla said the estimate isn't off by much. Eventually, as a nonprofit corporation, Mozilla will have to file a revenue statement with the US government tax agency. That statement is a public filing which means the real number will come out sooner or later.
It should be lost on no one that Google strongly supports the Firefox browser through a free toolbar and the search giant pays programmers to work on developer of each new version. Google is using Firefox to drive searches, and click through advertising, to its search portal. Google reported that in 2005 it had revenues of $6.1B. More than half of that amount, $3.4B, came from search related advertising alone.
Opera's Revenues
Undoubtedly, Opera, which also has search revenue deals with Google for desktop and mobile device products, would love to have Mozilla's numbers. According to the public 4Q05 year-end report, Opera's year-end financials tell a story of a company speeding up its transition from licensing desktop browser software to end users to licensing its mobile technologies to Internet devices sold by telecommunuications giants. This month Opera inked a deal for Opera mini with T-Mobile to put the software on three new phones sold in Europe. This is the latest in a string of deals that put Opera's software on mobile devices marketed to millions by cell phone firms. The T-Mobile deal alone boosted Opera's stock price by 8%.
Opera made the desktop browser free in 3Q05, which resulted in a significant drop in those revenues. Previously, a desktop license cost $40. However, Opera made huge gains in revenues from Internet devices with an increase of $3.2M in revenue over 2004. Opera also inked search revenue deals with Google, Amazon, and other search engine portal sites for both the desktop browser and Opera mini, the firm's newest mobile device software.
Here are some additional highlights. Opera's financials are reported in NOK. I've converted the figures to USD.
* Total operating revenues $22.8M, down 18% from 2004 (-$4.9M)
* Total operating expenses $22.6M, up 45% from 2004 (+7.0M)
* Earnings after taxes dropped from $8.7M to $0.5M
Opera hired 69 staff during 2005 and revenue per employee dropped 39% from $142K to $86K. Payroll increased 42% from $3.5M to $4.9M.
These numbers clearly show Opera's significant investments in new product development and marketing. The company operates on a global basis with fewer than 300 paid employess. By comparison, Mozilla reportedly has fewer than 50 paid employees, but still depends on a worldwide network of volunteer developers who participate as part of the open source movement.
What we are talking about here is Internet commerce. A great roll'n roll song titled Money for Nothing by the group Dire Straits has lyrics that go like this . . .
Now look at them yo-yo’s that’s the way you do it
You play the guitar on the mtv
That ain’t workin’ that’s the way you do it
Money for nothin’ and chicks for free
Now that ain’t workin’ that’s the way you do it
Lemme tell ya them guys ain’t dumb
We gotta install microwave ovens
Custom kitchen deliveries
We gotta move these refrigerators
We gotta move these colour tv’s
And here is the rest of the story about Mozilla's millions . . .
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3590756
March 10, 2006
Mozilla's Millions?
By Sean Michael Kerner
Internet News
Thanks to Google, Mozilla is raking in millions of dollars of revenue, which is used to pay the employees of the recently formed Mozilla Corporation and fund project and infrastructure development.
Google, which makes its share of philanthropic and open source donations, also directly employs a few Firefox developers, including lead developer Ben Goodger.
Google isn't just paying Mozilla "millions" out of the kindness of its heart. It's more so based on the same basic principle which it pays other partners and affiliates, namely search.
The default start page for Firefox includes a Google search dialogue box. It also defaults to Google search in its engine option on the Search Bar within the browser navigational toolbar. Mozilla gets paid a publicly undisclosed amount for each Google search query made from Firefox by a user.
That Google pays content and search partners, as well as AdSense participants, is not new. What is interesting, however, is the amount that Mozilla earns from its users' Google queries.
"We are very fortunate in that the search feature in Firefox is both appreciated by our users and generates revenue in the tens of millions of dollars," Mozilla head Mitchell Baker wrote in a recent blog post.
One blogger has speculated that the figure is as high as $72 million in fact.
Mozilla Corporation board member Chris Blizzard said that the $72 million figure is not correct, "though not off by an order of magnitude."
The Mozilla Corporation uses the fund to pay its employees which currently number 40 full-time equivalents (FTE) according to Baker. Most of those FTE's reside in either Mountain View, Calif., or in and around Toronto, Canada.
Mozilla's Revenues
The revenue number for Mozilla is in some dispute, but a spokesman for Mozilla said the estimate isn't off by much. Eventually, as a nonprofit corporation, Mozilla will have to file a revenue statement with the US government tax agency. That statement is a public filing which means the real number will come out sooner or later.
It should be lost on no one that Google strongly supports the Firefox browser through a free toolbar and the search giant pays programmers to work on developer of each new version. Google is using Firefox to drive searches, and click through advertising, to its search portal. Google reported that in 2005 it had revenues of $6.1B. More than half of that amount, $3.4B, came from search related advertising alone.
Opera's Revenues
Undoubtedly, Opera, which also has search revenue deals with Google for desktop and mobile device products, would love to have Mozilla's numbers. According to the public 4Q05 year-end report, Opera's year-end financials tell a story of a company speeding up its transition from licensing desktop browser software to end users to licensing its mobile technologies to Internet devices sold by telecommunuications giants. This month Opera inked a deal for Opera mini with T-Mobile to put the software on three new phones sold in Europe. This is the latest in a string of deals that put Opera's software on mobile devices marketed to millions by cell phone firms. The T-Mobile deal alone boosted Opera's stock price by 8%.
Opera made the desktop browser free in 3Q05, which resulted in a significant drop in those revenues. Previously, a desktop license cost $40. However, Opera made huge gains in revenues from Internet devices with an increase of $3.2M in revenue over 2004. Opera also inked search revenue deals with Google, Amazon, and other search engine portal sites for both the desktop browser and Opera mini, the firm's newest mobile device software.
Here are some additional highlights. Opera's financials are reported in NOK. I've converted the figures to USD.
* Total operating revenues $22.8M, down 18% from 2004 (-$4.9M)
* Total operating expenses $22.6M, up 45% from 2004 (+7.0M)
* Earnings after taxes dropped from $8.7M to $0.5M
Opera hired 69 staff during 2005 and revenue per employee dropped 39% from $142K to $86K. Payroll increased 42% from $3.5M to $4.9M.
These numbers clearly show Opera's significant investments in new product development and marketing. The company operates on a global basis with fewer than 300 paid employess. By comparison, Mozilla reportedly has fewer than 50 paid employees, but still depends on a worldwide network of volunteer developers who participate as part of the open source movement.
What we are talking about here is Internet commerce. A great roll'n roll song titled Money for Nothing by the group Dire Straits has lyrics that go like this . . .
Now look at them yo-yo’s that’s the way you do it
You play the guitar on the mtv
That ain’t workin’ that’s the way you do it
Money for nothin’ and chicks for free
Now that ain’t workin’ that’s the way you do it
Lemme tell ya them guys ain’t dumb
We gotta install microwave ovens
Custom kitchen deliveries
We gotta move these refrigerators
We gotta move these colour tv’s
And here is the rest of the story about Mozilla's millions . . .
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3590756
March 10, 2006
Mozilla's Millions?
By Sean Michael Kerner
Internet News
Thanks to Google, Mozilla is raking in millions of dollars of revenue, which is used to pay the employees of the recently formed Mozilla Corporation and fund project and infrastructure development.
Google, which makes its share of philanthropic and open source donations, also directly employs a few Firefox developers, including lead developer Ben Goodger.
Google isn't just paying Mozilla "millions" out of the kindness of its heart. It's more so based on the same basic principle which it pays other partners and affiliates, namely search.
The default start page for Firefox includes a Google search dialogue box. It also defaults to Google search in its engine option on the Search Bar within the browser navigational toolbar. Mozilla gets paid a publicly undisclosed amount for each Google search query made from Firefox by a user.
That Google pays content and search partners, as well as AdSense participants, is not new. What is interesting, however, is the amount that Mozilla earns from its users' Google queries.
"We are very fortunate in that the search feature in Firefox is both appreciated by our users and generates revenue in the tens of millions of dollars," Mozilla head Mitchell Baker wrote in a recent blog post.
One blogger has speculated that the figure is as high as $72 million in fact.
Mozilla Corporation board member Chris Blizzard said that the $72 million figure is not correct, "though not off by an order of magnitude."
The Mozilla Corporation uses the fund to pay its employees which currently number 40 full-time equivalents (FTE) according to Baker. Most of those FTE's reside in either Mountain View, Calif., or in and around Toronto, Canada.
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