Mozilla has just published their annual “The State of Mozilla” report. They do this once they’ve filed their audited financial statements for the previous year, so these numbers are for 2009. Still, they’re impressive numbers given how much competition their is in the market — particularly from their biggest benefactor: Google.
For 2009, Mozilla reported revenues of $104 million. That was up 34 percent from 2008 when revenues were $78 million. Notably, that revenue number includes a $104,000 loss from long-term investments, but that’s a huge improvement from 2008 when the same loss was $7.8 million. So where does Mozilla make most of this money from? Firefox, of course, thanks largely to their search deal with Google. In the FAQ section of the report, Mozilla addresses this:
The majority of Mozilla’s revenue is generated from search functionality included in our Firefox product through all major search partners including Google, Yahoo, Yandex, Amazon, Ebay and others. Mozilla’s reported revenue also include very important individual and corporate donations and grants as well as other forms of income from our investable assets.
While they list a few companies, Google is clearly the key here as further down, they address both their relationship and their contract with the search giant specifically:
We have had a productive relationship with Google since 2004 and that relationship remains healthy. To date, we have renewed our contract three times, in 2005, 2006 and 2008. The current version extends through 2011. We believe that search providers will remain a solid generator of revenue for Mozilla for the foreseeable future.
The relationship between Google and Mozilla is an interesting one because Google has its own browser, Chrome, that competes with Firefox. And by all measurements, Chrome continues to gain market share at a rapid pace. While it still looks as if most of the share they’re taking is from industry leader Internet Explorer, Firefox’s growth has slowed down significantly since Chrome started to take off.
In the “Competitive World” section of their report, Mozilla dives into why they believe Firefox 4 is going to take the browser to the next level. The latest version is in late-stage beta testing and should be out shortly. Here, they also rattle off some big numbers for Firefox, such as more than 400 million total users, over 140 million active daily users, and 800,000 Firefox 4 beta testers.
Going forward, Mozilla outlines how they’re putting an emphasis on mobile, apps, sharing and syncing, their Drumbeat project (promoting the open web).
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General Partner
M.G. Siegler is a general partner at Google Ventures, where he primarily focuses on early-stage investments. He has been deeply involved in the startup space since 2005, first as a web developer, then as a writer, and most recently as an investor and advisor. Having spent the past year in London helping to get Google Ventures’ European organization up and running, M.G. is now back in the Bay Area, working mainly out of Google Ventures’ San Francisco office. Before joining Google Ventures, M.G. was a founding partner of CrunchFund, an early-stage investment fund. Prior to that, he reported on the startup world as a writer for both TechCrunch and VentureBeat. M.G. still writes a column for TechCrunch on top of writing on his own sites and from time-to-time doing movie reviews in haiku. Originally from Ohio, M.G. graduated from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor before moving out west to work in Hollywood. One day, he will write that killer screenplay.
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