All of the other trendy bloggers are linking to this story, so I figured I should as well. I’m a big time follower.

Mozilla just reported the 2005 earnings for its Firefox browser, and they aren’t too shabby, especially when you consider the source of these earnings. A $52.9 million year is pretty damn good for an open source software project.

Where does this $52.9 million paycheck come from? While Mozilla doesn’t disclose the exact breakdown of revenue sources, most of the revenue comes from the little Google searchbox in the top right of your Firefox window. That’s right, whenever you perform a search using that searchbox and click any of the sponsored Adsense links, Mozilla gets about 80% of the ad revenue that Google receives.

Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t a bad thing at all. I’m all for the advancement of the Firefox browser and the continued success of the Adsense program. I think it is an ingenious source of revenue for a software project going up against the big boys. By simply providing a useful feature to its users, Mozilla gets to cash a big ass paycheck.
I need to start a browser.

Sidenote: about 25% of FatDickSimon readers use Firefox.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 4th, 2007 at 12:04 am and is filed under Technical Writings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.