Where does Mozilla get its money from?
February 1st, 2009
Seriously… their products are free, theres no advertising, they employ and pay around 150 people full time, and they spend massive amounts in bandwidth costs. (firefox 3.0 was downloaded over 1million times during the first 24hours after its release)
How on earth do they afford it all?!
This is a question that often occurred to me, so I set about looking for answers…
Turns out Mozilla have a partnership with Google. For shipping firefox with the default search choice as google, google shell out an undisclosed sum per search from that bar in the top right.
“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,” Wrote Mitchell Baker (head of the Mozilla foundation) in a blog post from 2006.
Trawling the web looking for info didn’t reveal anything particularly recent, infact, any figures at all, where to be found in various blog posts and articles from 2006. Including this post from Christopher Blizzard, another notable member of Mozilla.
“There have been a couple of articles written about the amount of money that the Mozilla Foundation has raised through various means. This entry says “72 million” and has been repeated over on digg.com. I won’t comment on the dollar amount except to say that it’s not correct, though not off by an order of magnitude.”
Google and Mozilla have recently renewed their deal which now lasts until September 2011. Given the growing popularity of Mozilla products (namely firefox) it seems like a fairly safe assumption that the 72 million (ish) from 2006 will have risen considerably.
