Mozilla Gets 85% of Revenue from Google

Towards the end of Mozilla’s 2006 Financial statements in the section called “Concentration of Risk” it reads:

“Mozilla has a contract with a search engine provider for royalties. The contract originally expired in November 2006 but was renewed for two years and expires in November 2008. Approximately 85% of Mozilla’s revenue for 2006 was derived from this contract.”

That one source responsible for almost all their revenue was Google. Now if I could choose a partnership to rely on, Google would be at the top of my list. But there are threats – like a plugin called Adblock Plus for Firefox that blocks the very ads that generate their income.

According to Mozilla: “The Foundation’s purpose is to develop open source, standards compliant, free Internet applications that will be useable free of charge to tens of millions of users. In addition, its purpose is to develop foundational technologies that will be used by content and software developers to develop standards compliant online content and open source internet software.” As they sum it up they build technology for public benefit. Their browser Firefox being the most popular.

The Mozilla Foundation earns money for integrating Google search into the Firefox web browser and Google.com comes up after the download. Last year they made over $66 million. That’s up 26 per cent from 2005, and the majority of even that was from Google. I believe the companies collaborate (they are neighbors).

Mitchell Baker, CEO of Mozilla and chairwoman of the Mozilla Foundation posted about the results and reiterated that Mozilla fiercely defends their autonomy. If that means walking away from Google, she says that is fine. She sees the Foundation as belonging to and responsive to the community foremost.

Techworld points out that Google has paid part of some Mozilla employees’ salaries and Frank Watson at SearchEngineWatch.com suggested it’s time to rename Mozilla to Googzilla or GoogleFox. I prefer GoogleFox myself.

Expenses were $19.8 million – I’d like to know how much is done by volunteers. I don’t know how many paid staff work for Mozilla. And actually, to me, working there would be the next best thing to working for Google.