UPDATE: I know a lot of folks are coming here from DIGG and other memetrackers. The $72M someone told me at BarCampLA and I have no idea if that is true or not. If you reblog this (or report it) please make sure you make that clear.
The best piece of information I got out of BarCampLA was that Firefox, which is produced by the for-profit Mozilla Corporation, made $72M last year and is on target to have 120 employees this year. I have no idea if this is true (anyone?), but it makes sense. I mean, there have to be 72M people using Firefox out there, and making $1 a year seems low to me! Mark Pincus brought this topic up recently.
Mozilla Corporation makes all that money because of the Google Search box on the top right. If you search with that box (which I do all day long) and you click on the Google ads on the results page Firefox gets ~80% of that. They also have Amazon in the search box, and other services that I'm sure kick them back some affiliate fees. Brilliant.
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.
Did you know that you could take the Firefox code and make your own Browser?! I think I want to make the "Jason Browser," anyone out there know how to do this? I'm serious, I want to put a wrapper around Firefox with a bunch of Jason-specific services. Hit me on email (jason at calacanis dot com).
For background, the for profit Mozilla.com company is a spinout of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation. From what I've read all the profits from the for profit Mozilla flow into the non-profit Mozilla foundation. No idea why they had to create this type of structure but I heard an interview with Mitchell Baker who explained that there is nothing nefarious going on. She says all the IP is still owned by Mozilla Foundation and no one can ever make money off of Mozilla.com (I wonder if the folks who work at Mozilla.com get stock options, or if the company would ever go public?). Frankly, there are so many great people working at/associated with Mozilla so I'm sure it's all good.
More details on Mozilla at Wikipedia:
Mozilla Foundation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation
Mozilla Corporation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation
Firefox (Mozilla Corporation/Mozilla Foundation) made $72M last year?!
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Reader Comments
(Page 1 of 2)2. Im glad of this news, it shows free software is clearly profitable even if it does rely on dirty ads;
Even with the newcomers such as flock and maxthon, firefox's market share will increase over the years, $1 per user aint bad, it aint great - however I bet lots of companies that give away there software would be happy with that.
Its all about repackaging free code, we are the cut and paste generation it seems.
btw where is the proof that they are making this money? i know its not like firefox would shoot this info out into public space, but the Pincus blog starts of with "i've been hearing rumors that firefox (from mozilla.org) is making over $30m annually off of its deal for the google search box." ???
Posted at 2:27PM on Mar 6th 2006 by Jme Giffo
3. The 2004 form 990 from the Mozilla Foundation shows $4.4mm in "sponsorship revenues" with total revenues just under $5mm. Gifts came in right around $1.25mm.
They requested two extensions to file last year, so we may be waiting until later this year for hard numbers from 2005.
http://guidestar.org is a good source for non-profit information.
Posted at 3:11PM on Mar 6th 2006 by Sam
4. This is the second time I've heard this figure this week. One of the presenters at Under the Radar said that "sources" inside Mozilla gave him this figure. Your attribution of the number is equally cryptic.
Where's this number coming from?
Posted at 5:02PM on Mar 6th 2006 by Adam Kalsey
5. I removed this search box in favour of Google Bar Lite - is there any way I can configure Google Bar Lite to use the same URL as the default search box so Mozilla can benefit from my searches?
Posted at 6:34PM on Mar 6th 2006 by Amos Shapira
6. Im glad theyre making money off me, doesnt make me feel guilty for not helping em at the launch of firefox....(i really wanted to do the firefox ad thing in Ny Times)just awesome. Congrats to firefox, this is music to my ears.
Posted at 9:04PM on Mar 6th 2006 by JaEd
7. To come back on the source of this figure: did you notice that the Wikipedia Corp page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation mentions this figure officially as 2005 revenue for Moz Corp.
If we assume that this page is maintained by insiders, it makes this number valid.
didier
Posted at 11:41PM on Mar 6th 2006 by Didier DURAND
8. This is really really nice to hear.
It goes further to prove the viability of free software.
I think alot goes to the google gang for all their productive ideas and creativity.
I'm starting up my free services too.
No doubt I should hit that amount in three years..;)
Posted at 2:41AM on Mar 7th 2006 by Onogberie Prosper
9. but rumors fly quickly as heck, for all you know that was put there from this blog!
wikipedia is a great place for knowledge, but tons of times rumors make it in and aren't corrected, for all it mattered you could have put that up there!
just my two cents, not that i dislike wikipedia, it's not awlays credible.
Posted at 2:43AM on Mar 7th 2006 by Rodents
11. Anyone who believes this is stupid in the head. Why would google pay any money to mozilla crop for this? They would not pay if someone typed google.com into the address box, visited google and clicked a link, why would a search box be any different?
Any passing idiot or malicious person can edit a wikipedia page. The mozilla corp page has now been edited to say that this is an unsubstantiated rumour.
We await an official response from Mozilla.
Posted at 5:06AM on Mar 7th 2006 by Bob
12. While it seems like a lot of money, it is consistent with something I discovered at the SEM/SEO conference in NYC (Search Engine Strategies) last week. Great little company showing a custom branded & configurable toolbar called Dynamic Toolbar has a very low license fee. I probed to understand how the revenue model works and voila! It becomes obvious -> their "default" search partner is Yahoo! and the search piece is coded to provide an alternate income stream for them. The conference showed overall that there's obscene money out there when you can influence page views and especially click throughs.
Posted at 8:13AM on Mar 7th 2006 by Steve
13. "(I wonder if the folks who work at Mozilla.com get stock options, or if the company would ever go public?)"
No, and no. See http://www.mozilla.org/reorganization/
Posted at 10:04AM on Mar 7th 2006 by Neil Paris
14. Even in the localized dutch firefox browser there's besides google and some others a bookseller added to the search box by default (bol.com). I've always wondered why they've choosen to add it. Now with this post it makes perfect sense.
Seems a good and not annoying way to make some money.
15. Chris Blizzard says at his blog (http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=182) that "the dollar amount ... [is] not correct, though not off by an order of magnitude."
He also says "I see people talking a lot about the huge profits here, but we don?t think about the excess as profits. Some of that money does roll up to the Foundation proper, but we work with them to determine when and where that happens. There?s no chance of an IPO and it?s not being put into anyone?s bank account. Simply put: no one here is getting rich." and more on the topic as well.
Posted at 2:48PM on Mar 7th 2006 by dolphinling
17. Hmm, I owe an apology to the people who believed this.
I'm amazed. They have done some very shrewd deals to get this much money in.
I'm happy to get a nice browser for free. The people at opera software must be kicking themselves, I'm sure the opera browser would have a much bigger market share if they had not
had adverts in their browser(they reccently removed the ads).
i'm slightly concerned about the future because from what I'v seen of charitable organisations lazy or incompetent people don't get fired and the money gets spent on nice offices and trips for the staff. When the developers are doing it for fun it's different to them doing it for money. Bad code can be easily rejected and it's dosn't matter if some people get bored and go work on some other project for a month. The full time developers may find it's much less fun when they are supposed to work eight hours a day even when they don't feel like it.
They are likly to get addicted to the money. The field of sotware changes rapidly and the trend in online advertising is down. Fortunetly it's open source and if it turns into something as buggy and advert filled as netscape we can fork the code and repeat the cycle.
Posted at 6:35AM on Mar 8th 2006 by Bob
18. This is why the winners in 'search' are going to be the winners of the desktop UI.
http://wizzbox.wordpress.com/2006/03/02/why-the-search-battle-is-actually-a-desktop-battle/
19. They are at ~40 employees today. Looking to grow but steadily. M.com is a corporation, which means they can make revenue, and have to pay taxes. Corporations also can choose to issue stock. However, I'm not sure how being under a non-profit tweaks the usual rules.
However, when I i'viewed there recently, I was told that their employees do NOT get stock options. What's the $ upside? Well they are literally across the street from Google... which just announced that it bought Writely yesterday....
Posted at 11:16AM on Mar 10th 2006 by Penny Pincher
20. if firefox were making such big money from the small google search at the top, then i could basically do a toolbar, have people download it, and get revenues from their searches - but i can't... no-one does, unless results are displayed on a "proprietery page" with google ads placed on it... but firefox brngs u to a generic google page... forthermore, i don't believe google gives anyone 80% of the profit from an ad... on top of it all, if it were true, then opera would have long ago focused entirely on the search tool-box model and the browser business would have become heavility desnsed with competition of firefox varients...
120 employees is $10M per year expenses... this leaves them with basically $60 in earnings before tax more or less... with 40% growth per annum in revenues for google and some 40% increase in firefox distribution per year, i would expect their valuation to be with these numbers at around $10bl... this would have opened a browser war long ago... i think it's a hoax.
Posted at 5:11PM on Mar 10th 2006 by Oren
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1. Considering the amount of people that now use firefox I'm surprised they don't make more.
Posted at 12:52PM on Mar 6th 2006 by Jeff