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How does Firefox make money?

By Craig Taub

Added Friday 31/10/2008

This being my first real blog I decided to scan through the past 6/7 months of other Blogs written by some of my colleagues here at TotallyCommunications just to get an idea on how Blogs are written.

What I found was a repository filled with compelling and mentally stimulating articles. Each of which containing detailed descriptions/guides/reviews on almost anything one would find in the newspaper, except the subjects were usually computer related.

After spending a short period of time thinking what I should write about, I decided to write on something which I had often wondered about.

At this moment in time, as I write this article, my browser is open and running Firefox 3.0. Like all machines running a Windows operating system it comes with Internet Explorer loaded already, but like less than half of internet users I chose to take the initiative and downloaded Mozilla Firefox. Something I have absolutely no regrets about. The reasons for this are numerous but will have to wait until my next blog post.

The much anticipated launch day for Firefox 3.0 had 1 million users click on and download it in the first 24 hours alone. For something that is so widely used it makes sense to me that they put so much effort into their project. Firefox has made its owners over $74 million in the past year. But where does this money come from because I certainly didn't pay to download the product, and have thus far used it on a daily basis and never paid a thing. A lot of it comes from development grants and advertising revenue, however where does the rest of it come from?

The question can be solved by looking at the way that Firefox 3.0 is presented. What is it inside the browser that could make Firefox money? The answer is a found inside the browser itself.

ALL Firefox 3.0 browsers come equipped with a Google search bar in the top right hand corner. This cannot be removed or edited easily. For AdSense Referral publishers , Google pays $1 per referral (every person who installs Google Toolbar TO their Firefox) or per conversion (a conversion occurs when someone successfully installs Firefox WITH the Google Toolbar). This does not sound like much but considering that almost two thirds of ALL UK residence are on the internet, and almost 50% of this number uses Firefox, even in the UK alone the number of Firefox users is staggering*.

The ease of using this search bar also means that I will not even have to visit the Google homepage and do a search from there.

But the Google search bar has more functionality then it appears. If I was to click on the Google G image. A list of other sites appears to me. These include Amazon, Wikipedia, eBay. Almost all the sites which I would do a search in. This removes the hassle of having to go to the site each time I wanted to perform a search. Search engines can be easily added and removed allowing the user to take control of their search bar. A very neat little function indeed.

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