In March 2006, Weblogs, Inc. founder Jason Calacanis reported a rumor on his blog that Mozilla Corporation gained $72M during the previous year, mainly thanks to the Google search box in the Firefox browser.

The rumor was later addressed by Red Hat employee Christopher Blizzard, a member of the Mozilla Corporation board, who wrote on his blog that "it's not correct, though not off by an order of magnitude."

"I see people talking a lot about the huge profits, 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, " Blizzard added.

That Google pays content and search partners, as well as AdSense participants, is not new. What is interesting, however, is the amount that Mozilla earns from its users' Google queries.

"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," Mozilla head Mitchell Baker wrote in a recent blog post.

The default start page for Firefox includes a Google search dialogue box. It also defaults to Google search in its engine option on the Search Bar within the browser navigational toolbar. Mozilla gets paid for each search, regardless of whether or not you click on ads.

It's such a good business that the folks at Flock and Maxthon are trying to do a similar thing by building a wrapper with value-added services (like bookmarking tools) on top of Firefox. Its all about repackaging free code.

This idea of paid carriage for the browser makers is nothing new. Back in 1996, when Netscape was dominant, they charged Yahoo, Infoseek, Excite, Lycos, and Magellan $5M each for a rotation of the traffic off of their Search button. That was when these 5 search engines were doing 20M queries/day collectively, not the billions of page views Google does now.

It's unclear whether Mozilla has another revenue-generating option from within the browser itself.


The default start page for Firefox includes a Google search dialogue box. In addition, Google is hosting the Firefox start page because, according to Baker, the company's technical infrastructure is more capable of supporting high volumes of traffic..

Google, which makes its share of philanthropic and open source donations, also directly employs a few Firefox developers, including lead developer Ben Goodger.

The for-profit Mozilla Corporation uses the fund to pay its employees which currently number 40 full-time equivalents (FTE) according to Baker. Most of those FTE's reside in either Mountain View, Calif., or in and around Toronto, Canada.

Upon its creation, the Mozilla Corporation took over several areas from the Mozilla Foundation, including the development of Firefox and Thunderbird and the management of relationships with businesses.

The Mozilla Corporation was established on August 3, 2005 to handle the revenue-related operations of the Mozilla Foundation. As a non-profit, the Mozilla Foundation is limited in terms of the types and amounts of revenue. The Mozilla Corporation, as a taxable organization (essentially, a commercial operation), does not have to comply with such strict rules.

"Bill Gates teaches us that a foundation can be very large. The Mozilla Foundation is in no danger of reaching the Gates Foundation's $28.8 billion endowment. The real reason for the change isn't the amount of revenue but its source. There are some revenue streams, such as selling commercial products, which nonprofits often must avoid. There are also some activities, especially political ones, which cannot be funded with tax-deductible donations," wrote ZDNet Executive Editor David Coursey in August last year.

"The foundation is crossing a line from which it can never retreat, taking with it a bit of the romance of software by the people, for the people," Coursey wrote.

The best reason for adding a for-profit to the Mozilla mix is that it would be pretty hard, over time, to do big business without one. Needing so much organization means Mozilla is straying from its mission of developing free software and giving it away, using donations and volunteer time as its chief resources.

"I don't believe there won't be serious conflicts in the future between the foundation and the corporation if the for-profit group starts generating lots of cash. Money brings power, and people who make that happen will want a bigger slice of both. It's human nature," wrote InternetWeek Editor Antone Gonsalves in August last year.

"If the Mozilla Corporation is successful, I would also expect to see resentment build among the many developers contributing code for free," added Gonsalves.

SOURCE: Internet News; Mozilla; Jason Calacanis; Antone Gonsalves; David Coursey