Mozilla has just published their annual “The State of Mozilla” report. They do this once they’ve filed their audited financial statements for the previous year, so these numbers are for 2009. Still, they’re impressive numbers given how much competition their is in the market — particularly from their biggest benefactor: Google.
For 2009, Mozilla reported revenues of $104 million. That was up 34 percent from 2008 when revenues were $78 million. Notably, that revenue number includes a $104,000 loss from long-term investments, but that’s a huge improvement from 2008 when the same loss was $7.8 million. So where does Mozilla make most of this money from? Firefox, of course, thanks largely to their search deal with Google. In the FAQ section of the report, Mozilla addresses this:
The majority of Mozilla’s revenue is generated from search functionality included in our Firefox product through all major search partners including Google, Yahoo, Yandex, Amazon, Ebay and others. Mozilla’s reported revenue also include very important individual and corporate donations and grants as well as other forms of income from our investable assets.
While they list a few companies, Google is clearly the key here as further down, they address both their relationship and their contract with the search giant specifically:
We have had a productive relationship with Google since 2004 and that relationship remains healthy. To date, we have renewed our contract three times, in 2005, 2006 and 2008. The current version extends through 2011. We believe that search providers will remain a solid generator of revenue for Mozilla for the foreseeable future.
The relationship between Google and Mozilla is an interesting one because Google has its own browser, Chrome, that competes with Firefox. And by all measurements, Chrome continues to gain market share at a rapid pace. While it still looks as if most of the share they’re taking is from industry leader Internet Explorer, Firefox’s growth has slowed down significantly since Chrome started to take off.
In the “Competitive World” section of their report, Mozilla dives into why they believe Firefox 4 is going to take the browser to the next level. The latest version is in late-stage beta testing and should be out shortly. Here, they also rattle off some big numbers for Firefox, such as more than 400 million total users, over 140 million active daily users, and 800,000 Firefox 4 beta testers.
Going forward, Mozilla outlines how they’re putting an emphasis on mobile, apps, sharing and syncing, their Drumbeat project (promoting the open web).
Born from Netscape’s 1998 open sourcing of the code base behind its Netscape Communicator internet suite, Mozilla Firefox currently holds approximately 22.48% of the world market for internet browsers as of April 2009. Version 1.0 was released on November 9, 2004 after a series of name changes, and within a year close to 100 million downloads of the browser technology had occurred. The following two years saw upgrades to version 1.5 in November 2005 and 2.0 in October 2006....
Firefox is a Web browser created Mozilla Corporation. Since its release in 2002 (as Phoenix 0.1, later named as Firebird then Firefox as of 0.8 to present), the browser has become one of the most popular Web browsers in the market, trailing only Microsoft’s Internet Explorer as of July 2009.
Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps, YouTube, and Google+, the company’s extension into the social space. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing...
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