RSSMozilla Revenue Claim Sparks Frenzy
By Nate Mook | Published March 8, 2006, 1:45 PM
Since its inception, the non-profit Mozilla Foundation has remained active thanks to generous corporate backing and the hundreds of volunteers devoting countless hours toward building an open source browser. But little has been made of the company's revenue following the launch of the Mozilla Corporation -- until now.
The rumor frenzy was started by Weblogs, Inc. founder-turned AOL executive Jason Calacanis following the BarCamp conference in LA. "The best piece of information I got out of BarCampLA was that Firefox, which is produced by the for-profit Mozilla Corporation, made $72M last year and is on target to have 120 employees this year," said Calacanis.
Mozilla makes much of its money through the Google search box that ships on the popular Firefox Web browser. Each time a user clicks on a sponsored link in those search results, the company receives approximately 80 percent of that revenue, says Calacanis.
"They also have Amazon in the search box, and other services that I'm sure kick them back some affiliate fees," he added. "Brilliant."
The comments were soon picked up by Digg and referenced on a number of other blogs, generating thousands of responses. Some users questioned the Mozilla Foundation's request for donations when it was raking in so much from ads through its corporate subsidiary, but most users were supportive of the success.
Mozilla Corporation board member Christopher Blizzard responded to the speculation on his blog, saying that while the revenue number was not accurate, it was not far off. "I won't comment on the dollar amount except to say that it’s not correct, though not off by an order of magnitude," he wrote.
Blizzard added that, "I see people talking a lot about the huge profits here, 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."
The $72 million figure was also appended to the Mozilla Corporation's entry on Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, but was later removed. "Since the number has been stated as not out of line it sounds like someone is trying to play this down," remarked Calacanis.
Still, the AOL executive was positive about the apparent success Mozilla has begun to enjoy thanks to Firefox. "What an amazing business: make a kick-ass browser for $10-15M a year in expense and make $72M (and growing) in revenue. It's such a good business that the folks at Flock.com are trying to do a similar thing."
"Money is one of the last things we worry about and people shouldn't get hung up on the numbers, except to realize that it gives us options," noted Blizzard.
Isn't Firefox open source? Am I confused, or are people writing code and working out bugs with Firefox, and not getting paid for it? Will their 120 employees be paid, while the open source community will not???
UPDATE: FOUND THE ANSWER TO MY OWN QUESTION:
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/...9020384,39256661,00.htm
"She added that in the near future Mozilla will be looking at how it can disperse funds within its open source community.
"I've been told by some people that this is risky and that the thought of money distorts the community," she said. "But we do have money in the project now and some of it should get spent on a project-wide basis unrelated to employment. I'm hoping we can do this in a way that reflects our community organization and distributed authority. I'm not sure what the mechanism is yet but I know it needs to happen."
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|Good luck to them for a first class product
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|there are news like microsoft / google is buying opera,
what if Mozilla buys Opera ??????
(with money they have made)
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|won't happen
moz don't want to
opera don't want to
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|omg @ bulls***
~~Money is one of the last things we worry about and people shouldn't get hung up on the numbers, except to realize that it gives us options," noted Blizzard.~~
Yeah right, that's why it costs 26 bucks per 2 months + 40 bucks for a new expansion pack.
That a few million times (the players), guess how much they earn, yet they claim something like that.... yeah right.
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|"Mozilla Corporation board member Christopher Blizzard"
"Blizzard" is his name.
Don't you feel silly now?
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|If these jerks made $72 mil last year, why the hell are they still begging for donations from lowlifes like me?
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|a) They aren't jerks
b) You need a lot of money to beat a MS monopoly.
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|I don't care if they make $72m in revenue, go Mozilla! They're doing a great job, they deserve SOME sort of reward for that. People have to work and make a living ya know. They aren't selling anything with Firefox and they aren't forcing us to buy anything, so we should be thankful. I say give them all a little bit of that money to take home and do what they will with it. They've earned every cent of it.
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|Opera > Firefox
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|Opera =< Firefox
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|(Opera + 1)^2/512 >= SQRT(Firefox - e^2.5 +4)
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|I didn't read all the comments, so something similar may have been said...
Firefox is Open Source Software... Open Source is not about who makes the most money, and typically, OSS users also are not about who makes money (maybe more for saving money and or supporting the cause). In my opinin, it's like they said, "it's not like anyone is getting rich."
I agree with other users that Mozilla deserves it, at the same time, there is a point, that they don't really need to be asking for monetary donations.
I'm sure a lot (maybe not most) of the earnings will go back into the OSS community, if so, it's a winning situation all around.
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|Well they sure deserve it for making such and awesome browser :)
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|This might not be the best forum to ask this question, but figured I would give it a shot. I use firefox and enjoy it very much, but I do have one issue with it. When you type, say just a bunch of jibberish into the "main" address bar, it takes you to google and says it can't find any website. Does anyone know how to fix this so that it doesn't take me to google at all? In short, how can I completely remove google from firefox. And, just a reminder, I am not talking about the downloadable search extensions, I know how to remove those. Any comments would be appreciated, thanks.
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|By default, Firefox uses "I'm Feeling Lucky" for non-URLs typed into its address bar. You can change the behavior by going to about:config and setting keyword.URL to the appropriate URL and then restarting Firefox.
Type:
about:config
into your address bar.
In the filter-bar type keyword.URL
It should find that setting for you.
Change it to whatever you wish.
Restart Firefox
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|Opera does the same thing....Heh, IE is the odd one out, taking you to MSN(last I checked).
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|I use fire fox and opera. love em both. opera sometimes seems to run smoother than FF at times. Anyhting is better than IE.
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|Mozilla deserves every single penny.
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|Agreed.
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|http://www.howtocreate.c...rSpeed.html#testresults
this benchmark proves that ff takes 17 seconds and opera takes 2.
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|Agree Opera opens much faster then any browser. IE7 opens faster then FF1.5 on my machine.
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|Opera takes 2...
...and crashes after 900. :)
try using Opera with the Easynews USENET Web Client. In a Global search with over 1000 results, it will crash. Every time. On every machine. It's a guarantee.
Now, try it with IE. Or with FireFox. Low and behold, it does not crash.
Funny that....
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|Please don't quote that page. It's one person's tests that don't reflect 95% of people out there.
I've tested Firefox on an IBM Thinkpad 390e(333mhz PII processor) with IE REMOVED, and it took < 6s for cold start. Warm start was instant.
Here's a tip: Clear out your disk cache, go into about:config and set browser.cache.disk.capacity to 0, and browser.cache.memory.capacity to 262144
That will boost performance, and once your cache is cleared should reduce start times about 12 seconds.
On my system(Modified Win2k - AMD Athlon XP 2800+ w/ 1GB RAM) Firefox cold starts in 2s, while Opera 8.5 cold starts in 1.5s
Heh...and most people think Prefetching and other XP features boost performance. ;)
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|Kramy: I cant seem to find "browser.cache.memory.capacity" in the about:config.
I'm using the FF at my uni, i'll check my home comp, but i have turned the browser.cache.disk.capacity to "0" and with a warm start it takes around 1 second to load FF.
1 question though, by setting the "browser.cache.disk.capacity" does this mean that the broswer will never place any webpages into its cache on your HD?
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|Opera doesn't crash, unlike Firefox.
"try using Opera with the Easynews USENET Web Client. In a Global search with over 1000 results, it will crash. Every time. On every machine. It's a guarantee."
Give me and link and I'll try it.
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|Heh...
Sure, got $10?
Easynews.com :)
"Opera doesn't crash, unlike Firefox."
My computer respectfully disagrees with that statement.
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|Ahh, you may have to add 'browser.cache.memory.capacity' then. If I remember right by default Firefox will use up to 64mb mem as a cache, but that's really not much on today's systems; especially when swapping out to disk cache is slower.
If disk cache is set to 0, Firefox will not cache any webpages on the harddrive(or should not). If you have a small memory cache and an excissive number of pages open though, then when your memory cache is exceeded Firefox seems to swap large chunks of memory to and from VRAM(or something; big harddrive activity, and less efficient than having a disk cache.
So, that's why I set mine to 256mb - it's hard to have that many sites open at once that it is able to spend that much, but I suppose if you have TONS of memory, then you could put it higher.
Oh, and Gecko seems to be really inefficient at reading profiles off the disk - it loads up or processes all the cache data before actually starting the browser, something Opera either doesn't do, or does much more efficiently. Hopefully you'll see much reduced start times without a Disk Cache. =)
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|so why are you posting yours ?
you are an individual too
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|guys you are talking about warm start
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|How much does it matter?
Really?
I like FF more because it has more features I can easily utilize. 10 seconds a day is not going to change that.
I have Opera 9 as well. On my system, it rcashes constantly, cannot reload a simple page with more than 1000 lines without hanging, greatly dislikes simpe AJAX/Javascript pages....the list goes on and on.
Amazingly enough, everything else runs fine...my transcoders, my music players/encoders, my burning programs, you name it. All much more intensive than a frigging browser.
so yeah, FF may take a bit longer to start....but at least it stays running.
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|Opera 9 is a technology preview. It's meant to showcase new features. It's nowhere near a beta quality release.
Opera 8.5 seldom crashes on my machine.
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|He mentioned Opera 9 below. That was my reason for posting about it here.
Didn't mean to confuse.
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|im using 8.52, i mentioned 9 because it is the fastest in the benchmark.
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|And I pointed out that speed means pretty much nothing when it crashes all the time. :)
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|well I timed Firefox on my computer and it only takes 5 seconds to start, on a AMD Sempron 2.2 ghz and 768 megs of ram
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|Mine takes 3 seconds vs. IE's 1.5 seconds. Whoopie doo. :D
I'm running a 1.3GHz Pentium M, 1GB RAM.
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|ff should dump xul, xul is the bad thing about ff
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|oh yeah. amen.
there's an educated comment...
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|so u like ff's sloooooooow start ??
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|Firefox doesn't have a slow start time. Your computer must be infested with spyware or must have very little RAM installed.
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|hah. you do know opera and firefox are practically speaking just as fast starting up, at least at warm startups?
That means that which ever browser you choose, it will start roughly as quickly once you've started using it. Admittedly, Firefox is 15% slower even for warm startups, but that amounts to 0.36 secs on a 800 MHz system...
http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html
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|it takes 5 second for opera to load.
and my system is spyware free, has 512 mb ram.
ff takes 18 sec.
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|And? I can load FF in under 5 seconds, still doesn't mean your machine isn't screwed, SOMETHING is wrong with it, otherwise it wouldn't slow FF down.
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|my friend the link you have posted , mentions that opera 9 takes 2 seconds and Firefox around 17.
and in Script speed,Multiple images and in history History Opera is fastest too.
and im talking about cold startup, that is what matters.
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|my system runs every thing very very fast , and just because it takes 18 seconds to load FF that doesn't means that i have got spyware, and i use adaware, spysweeper regularly.
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|There are simply too many factors involved to ever make such a generalized statement such as yours. It takes my computer 10 seconds to load IE with Windows XP. However, it takes only 2 seconds to load IE from the same computer. Why?
1. Fragmentation of hard drive.
2. Memory usage.
3. CPU speed AND capabilities.
4. Hotfixes installed on OS.
5. Orphaned registry entries clogging the load time.
6. Browser add-ons, minor revisions, hotfixes, etc.
7. How many billions of ^$@! in your C:\Windows\Prefetch folder
8. Is your browser listed in the Prefetch Folder?
9. FAT32 vs. NTFS.
10. How many processes running in the background?
11. Trying to load browser right after OS finishes loading? Gonna take longer than trying it later.
12. Home page?
13. Browser cache? Cookies?
14. Lost chains/clusters (FAT/FAT32), or mismatched file indices anywhere (NTFS)?
15. Just opened and closed your browser? Ever heard of hard drive cache? Well...that 2MB/8MB/16MB cache will store for quick access to reopen it.
There are 14,000 or more reasons that I need not spell out for you. 512MB of memory means nothing.
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|Read my 15 point sermon above (LOL)
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|i use perfect disk, registry compactor, freeramxp pro,got Amd64, got no browser ad ons,i use ccleaner,have ntfs , got 32 processes, i usually hibernate, got default home page, got no disk errors. after all that i get 18 seconds just like the browser speed benchmark below -:
http://www.howtocreate.c...rSpeed.html#testresults
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|oh it is is it? I'm glad you explained that to us then.
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|and read my post above
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|Maybe you use too many cleaners. I was wondering what kind of people use all this freeware Windows cleaning crap that is out on the internet. Now I know.
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|I can see that you are quite persistent. Probably right, too. Problem is even with what you've told me, it will not necessarily reflect everybody else's configuration. That and for the record, FireFox 1.5 takes longer to load than IE 6 SP2, IE7 Beta 2, and Opera, COMBINED. Still though--I got it narrowed to 15 processes, any less and you'll lose internet/power saving functionality. Athlon X2 4400+ w/ Cool n' Quiet. Fresh OS install of XP gold, updated it to SP2 then other critical updates.
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|I don't use any third party cleaners ON MY PC other than when I suspect spyware issues, which is a rare thing. I use batch files, I run the plain jane Windows defrag program, chkdsk, services.msc, msconfig, and so forth. I don't want a third party utility to tell me what _IT_ thinks I need and don't need, I'll do it myself.
But that's just me. It doesn't work for most people because it requires one to waste 8 years of their life living and breathing the system32 folder contents, registry, and Windows services.
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|I was referring to anmol.2k4's comment.
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|I know, so was I. I guess I replied to the wrong post though :(
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|"Problem is even with what you've told me, it will not necessarily reflect everybody else's configuration."
Indeed. I'm running a Sempron64 3400+, 1GB of ram, with SUSE Linux 10.0. Firefox 3sec......Opera 6sec.
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|because oh my god you could be doing something super productive in those 7 extra seconds. yeah, if any browser takes more than 3 seconds to load it totally sucks because
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|Then you have a broken system.
Firefox takes ~4 seconds on the slowest PC I own COLD.
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|Your computer is broken.
You are just in denial, that or you are lying.
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|God, now you sound like me.
Other than the fact that I avoid Windows Defrag like the plague, much preferring O&O, you just described me.
I find that very disturbing. Stop it.
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|I think we need to see how they spend the money before we judge them. If they are giving their execs million dollars bonuses then they have obviously tarnished the publics trust with them. But if they use this money to further develop, further market, and overall make their products better then I have no problem with them making money or asking for money from me. Lets just say no one wants to donate to come CEO's bonus check. But if this gives them a chance to keep on competing with microsoft, which forces them to meet and beat the quality of mozilla products, its all good with me.
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|Why should anyone have a problem with them making money?
That would be like hating the Red Cross for having collected X $ million for tsunami rebuilding or something...
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|Don't even get me started on the American Red Cross they are a bunch of no good dirty scammers. During Vietnam the US Tabacco companies sent millions upon millions of cigarettes to our troops overseas via the red cross. They took them and then SOLD THEM to the people dying in war. The Red Cross is no good. I do donate to many causes but I will never donate money to the american red cross, I urge everyone to find an alternative to them.
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|Good good good, turn 100% of that "profit" into R&D dollars or just give all of your employees raises.
As long as no ones pockets are lined with the money this is a good thing.
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|In other words, it IS a good thing.
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|FF is not as good as opera.
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|sure buddy.
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|OT.
and BTW: whatever...
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|just couldn't stop myself.
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|obviously not
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|Really?
You're basing this on your personal preferences, right? Not on actual facts?
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|Money makes the world go round and anyone who says they don't care about it, is either a liar or just plain stupid.
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|They didn't say they don't care about it. They just said it isn't their top priority. Obviously it's worked out all the same.
I'm really glad to hear that Mozilla Corporation has raked in heaps of cash - that makes it more likely that Firefox will stay in the game for quite a while.
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|(deleted) On second thought, I think I'll wait to see the reactions of others before saying anything radical. I can say that there's no frenzy here--just exclude that "non-" that's written before the word "profit" from Mozilla's type of business, and fine with me. How can I hate Mozilla for making money?
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|Mozilla Foundation, the owners of MoCo, is still non-profit. That means that all the money will be invested in the company and won't end up in some stock owners pockets. The result will be better software, and swifter releases.
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|