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During the 2008 year the Mozilla Foundation reported revenues of $78 million dollars, this is surprising considering the company is running a free open source browser.

The revenue comes from various sources, though the main one is a contract with Google. As Google is the default search provider, they pay Mozilla each time someone clicks on an advertisement running through Search results. If you click on your search provider in the search bar, you will also notice Ebay and Amazon, they also both pay Mozilla through a sort of affiliate program.

Mozilla is just another great example of how to creatively earn income without actually disrupting user experience. The search bar itself is a welcome feature to the browser as you do not have to install anything extra to have a search bar on the browser menu. After Mozilla added a search bar, Internet Explorer followed suite in version 7 (I believe, not completely sure). The partnership with Google has not been a secret, as they have been posting their annual revenues for the last several years.

2004: $5.8 Million in revenue (source)

2005: $52.9 Million in revenue (source)

2006: $66.8 Million in revenue (Source)

2007: $75 Million in revenue (Source)

2008: $78.6 Million in revenue (Source)

As you can see, most of the browser’s growth was in 2004-5, though that may have been due to further implementations for Google in the browser. Firefox’s growth continues consistently, as in 2008 when Firefox 3.0 was released, it was downloaded 8 million times in 24 hours, earning them a Guinness world record.