Google: 300 Million dollars a year to be in Firefox

To be present in the Firefox web browser, Google will pay Mozilla 300 million dollars a years.

Does Google still need Firefox’s search traffic? The answer is clearly yes, and even more so that in the past.

It appeared that things weren’t so rosy between Google and Mozilla when negotiating the contract between the two for the search engine to be present in the Firefox browser (the default search engine, displayed on the welcome page). With the increased power of the Google Chrome browser and the possibility of becoming the second most used browser in the world in the near future, we have to wonder if such an agreement is really in Google’s favour.

At the beginning of the week, questions were certainly asked. For another three years, Google has an agreement with Mozilla, and while the financial terms of the agreement haven’t been revealed, the very serious All Things Digital – which cites anonymous sources – reports that Google will pay close to 300 million dollars a year to Mozilla, with the agreement being close to 900 million dollars over the coming three years.

In their 2010 financial report, Mozilla indicated that their agreement with Google produced 84 % of their 123,2 million dollars of revenue, with 103.5 million dollars being for 2010. Firefox is therefore still a "valuable partner" for Google as Alan Eustace declared (Vice-president of Google’s research), and it appears even more so than in the past in terms of financial cost.

According to  All Things Digital, while Mozilla may have managed to negotiate an increased price, it’s because Microsoft with Bing and Yahoo! was present. Microsoft has managed to outbid Google with the hope of knocking off the search giant within Firefox. This is because other search engines are also Mozilla partners, but their exposition in Firefox isn’t as present (not the default engine), while their financial contribution therefore not at the same level.

With hundreds of millions of global users, Firefox is extremely popular and Google doesn’t want to miss out on the traffic that it generates for the search engine. For some observers, Google is also interested in continuing their partnership with Mozilla and the competition it generates, as they are not interested in increased attention by authorities.


Accompanying the evolution of quick internet
For Mozilla, this relationship with Google will help with digital identification management (BrowserID), with mobility now going farther than being a simple browser in the operating system (Android core and Gecko engine for HTML5 applications), with a lot larger distribution through "Appstores" at a time that people are looking more towards open Web.