How to make money if you distribute free software
January 7th, 2007
Haven’t you ever wondered how exactly are companies that sell nothing makeing a profit?! Well there are several traditional ways the most important of which is advertising and as a good example Opera sells the premium version of their Internet browser along with technical support. But there are other ways to make profit and Mozilla is ready to prove this.
If you asked yourselves just how profitable is the Mozilla business and didn’t found an exact answer i’ll let you know you’re not alone! What I’ve heard is that according to the IRS declaration the total revenue for Mozilla was $29.8 million for the year 2005. combining that with the 100 million estimated downloads for the Firefox browser from Mozilla you get a rough 29 cents per download.
But where is Mozilla getting all that money from? Well here, there but mainly from a partnership with a search engine called Google! As most of you know Firefox has a embedded search bar with Google as a default search engine. Now the rumor has it that Google is paying Mozilla something ranging from 1 to 5 cents per search, that’s a hefty sum!
What’s the lesson here?! You can win some if you lose some, the FREE software from Mozilla is interesting, popular and FREE. More and more people download the good and totally unexpressive software and by doing so they are redirected to Google that has a new way to expose the paid ads, brilliant!
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Comments
> Opera sells the ads-free version of their Internet browser
You are aware they stopped doing this whole ad-related stuff around 18 months ago? Opera today is adfree and free as in beer.
There was a small misunderstanding that I’ve made. Sorry!