Mozilla's revenue went up came from Google and Yahoo

Nov 27, 2015

Last year Mozilla's revenue went up 4.9% to $329M, 90% came from Google and Yahoo

Mozilla just released its financial report for 2014, showing a small revenue increase. VentureBeat reports that 90 percent of that revenue came from Google and Yahoo.

For years, Mozilla has made a lot of their money from a sponsorship agreement with Google. Mozilla made Google Firefox’s default search engine and Google paid them for it. Last year that deal came to an end and a new five-year deal with Yahoo took over. Basically, it works like this: You type in a search, and then Google or Yahoo makes some money off AdSense ads. Then some of that money would come to Mozilla as part of a revenue-sharing deal.

In the report (PDF), the numbers for 2014 breaks down like this. Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiaries made $311 million in revenue in 2012 and $314 million in 2013. In 2014, the number was $329 million (just less than a 5 percent increase.) Expenses went up by 7.6 percent in 2014 to $318 million.

These numbers come from before the Google deal ended, and now Mozilla says it isn’t getting anything from them. Google is still the default search engine in Europe, but Denelle Dixon-Thayer, Mozilla's chief business and legal officer, told CNET that "We don't have a commercial relationship with Google at this point."

It will be interesting to see how Mozilla does as it moves forward without depending on one search engine (and their money) alone.

Source: TECHSPOT