The browser business isn't a half bad place to be, it seems.
What an amazing business: make a kick-ass browser for $10-15M a year in expense and make $72M (and growing) in revenue. It's such a good business that the folks at Flock.com are trying to do a similar thing by building a wrapper with value-added services (like bookmarking tools) on top of Firefox.
Makes you wonder how much Microsoft income is derived from Search in Internet Explorer, doesn't it?
Someone should make a "cash cow" skin for Firefox. :-)
Posted by jzawodn at March 06, 2006 10:45 AM
Jason goes on to say in that article that "I have no idea if this is true (anyone?), but it makes sense" ... so the $72M number is not confirmed/verified ... but does seem reasonable to me. Didn't know they had the 80% deal with Google - do they have any type of similar arrangement with Yahoo?
Man, that ain't bad bidness for an open source app. I wonder if Camino is getting its fair shake? ;)
Oh, and for a Firefox skin, try PimpZilla.
Makes you wonder what Yahoo had to give up to Mozilla for the China deal.
Makes sense...tell Amr that's where HIS Goog money wound up.
I guess jeremy.zawodny.com/blog didn't earn much, seeing as how the ads and sponsored links are gone.
I've been convinced for years that MSN rakes in the dough from people who don't know how to change their IE homepage. Their rotations of ads and news in the site's headlines is fairly manipulative. For example, they're currently rotating a story on the dangers of cheerleading with an advertorial called "How not to Dump Someone" that is nothing but an ad for Match.com posing as news.
I wonder if their search revenue has dropped since they stopped displaying LookSmart results as their primary results?
I examined the Mozilla Foundation tax returns. The Mozilla Foundation recieves revenue from two sources. One is for agreements between search providers and mozilla. In 1994, this totaled $4.4 million. The second is for expedited development contracts. Some large companies pay a fee for expediting the development of particular functions.
In 2004, these were the top fee payers:
Google $225,000
IBM $150,000
Open Source Applications Foundation $72,192
Omidyar Network Fund $7,000
Some salaries:
Brenden Eich $152,885
Chris Hoffman $142,692
Scott Mcgregor $132,500
Johnny Stenbeck $127,403
Good to see that a non-profit, community-based venture is getting a cut of the google action.
There's a site, point2good http://www.catablog.net/ that works as syndication partner for google. Whenever searches are made from that site, a charity gets a cut of google's pay per click revenue. You can even choose the charity (although they are just getting started with getting charities on board). Idea is that you raise money for charity whenever you search the web.
Charitable idea. Key question is whether philanthropy is enough of a motivator to get folks to use the site. A firefox searchbox would help.
Just happened to see the above comment and wanted to make a correction. The site's URL is http://www.point2good.org. I invite you all to come by and have a look.
michael.
