| These are the cold, hard numbers on which @incepted based his comments: Mozilla gets the bulk of its revenue from search deals.[1] For 9 years, from 2005 to 2014, Google paid Mozilla to set Firefox's default search provider to be google.com. In those 9 years, the Firefox browser share rose to peak of ~30% in 2010 and then fell consistently due to competition from Chrome.[2] In 2014, when Google's contract with Mozilla came up for renewal, Firefox browser market share was just 12.4%.[3] Google probably decided that continuing to pay Mozilla the same amount of money for much less traffic wasn't worth it, so they didn't renew. Mozilla then locked Yahoo! into a five-year contract.[4] One year into the Yahoo deal, Firefox's browser market share is now 9.8%.[3] If the long term declining trend continues, four years later the market share would be even smaller. That's when Yahoo!'s contract ends. That's also when the question will arise: if Google paid $300 million a year for search traffic from 12.4% browser share in 2014 who will pay how much for far less search traffic in 2019? [1] Nov 25, 2015: Mozilla’s 2014 annual report: Revenue up 4.9% to $329M, 90% came from Google and Yahoo http://venturebeat.com/2015/11/25/mozillas-2014-annual-repor... [2] Wikipedia: Usage share of web browsers > Historical usage share > StatCounter (July 2008 to present) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#St... [3] Oct 21, 2015: Firefox will fight back against intrusive advertisers http://www.cnet.com/news/firefox-will-fight-back-against-int... [4] Nov 19, 2014: Yahoo and Mozilla Form Strategic Partnership
https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2014/11/yahoo-and-mozilla-for... |