How Firefox Makes Money

Ever wondered how firefox is still running even though all of Mozilla’s products are for free..

First, it must be denotations, the “Best Browser Implementing Web Standards” - according to Mozilla - must be receiving lots of denotations from its wide user base. But There are actually two Mozillas, the Foundation and the Corporation.

The Foundation is a non-profit organization that handles the leadership for the open source Mozilla project, the polices, key infrastructure, trademarks and that stuff. Its revenue is tax-exempt status under the U.S. tax code as it’s based in Mountain View, California.

The Corporation is a subsidiary of the foundation that coordinates the development of internet-related applications such as firefox. It also depends on denotations but there’s also a deal with Google that whenever a user uses that little search box on the top right and he/she clicks an ad in the search results offered by Google, Mozilla gets 80% of the revenue. That little box is rumored to had made $72M last year. It’s confirmed (by Wikipedia, read the Financing section) that $61.5M were Mozilla’s revenues in 2006 because of the little box out of a total $66.8M of revenues.

It’s good to see Mozilla going strong financially as they are technically. Looks like the red fox is gonna be sticking around for a while.. bad news for the guys in Redmond..