on Jan 9th, 2007Mozilla discloses $53Million in revenues
Mozilla corporation, makers of my favorite firefox, thunderbird have disclosed revenues for the year 2005 and its an astounding $53Million. Now one has to give mozilla the credit for such an astounding project like firefox, but you also have to take into account the fact that its a non profit organisation.
Major part of the revenue is apparently generated by the search engine relationships, for example google search, which was introduced next to the address bar on mozilla. Not only is this feature great but it also helps generate revenue. A similar step was taken by another browser Opera(which still remains my favorite), who made their pay for subscription browser free. People were overawed at getting opera for free, at least I was. Which brings us back to this question, what are the products/services that we will pay for in the future? what are the ones that will remain free? Mail being the most important form of communication even now, I don’t suppose people will bat an eyelid if yahoo and gmail becomes a paid service.
As for mozilla, the revenue growth due to the inline search box seems to be almost ten times the figure in 2004. They are even improvising the feature, their latest release, Firefox2 saw auto suggestions for the search bar, like Google Suggest. Which brings me back to another question, does Google Suggest/ Firefox Suggest work to display good content or (highly lucrative) targeted ads? Think we need to research on this….