[ChuckMcM]

Maybe? It certainly continues to raise the cost to Google for the search traffic provided by Firefox. When Firefox switched to Firefox it boosted Yahoo!'s organic share of search [1], which if it held up at the 2% speculated would represent about (16.8B * 2%) 336M searches in Feb '17 [2] attributable to the Mozilla deal. One would need to work backward from the revenue per thousand (RPM) to see what sort of ROI that gave Yahoo!.

The story at the time was that Google walked away from the deal when Mozilla wanted more than they thought their traffic was worth, and now Google is back 2 years before the contract expires makes me wonder if Mozilla was more accurate in the relative value of their ability to generate search traffic. So now I'm curious to see how much Google's traffic acquisition costs have gone up (TAC) with this switch.

[1] https://www.digitalreachagency.com/blog/firefox-deal-boosts-...

[2] https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Rankings/comScore-Releases...

[greglindahl]

My handwave for the previous Google deal was that Mozilla was getting paid about 10% of the money Google made from Firefox searches. There's a lot of money there.

[zerr]

How that amount is calculated and how transparent it is (to Mozilla or similar partners)?

[dblohm7]

Google did not walk away from Mozilla in 2014. Mozilla walked away from Google.