Mozilla Beats The Recession

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The Mozilla Corporation, the for-profit business arm of Mozilla, has posted a 5% revenue increase, last year. Mozilla is best known for being the manager of popular web browser Firefox. Most of Mozilla’s income comes from deals from search providers.

Mozilla gets its revenue through deals with Google and other search providers, and Mozilla also receives a cutback from the search providers every time one of their users does a search through Firefox. A small number of their revenue is generated through investments and private donations, and their released records indicated that they (like everybody) had their investments weakened by the recession.

Still, even with one of their revenue streams weakened, Mozilla posted $78 million USD in revenue, up from 5% from 2007. Of that money, Mozilla spent $49 million USD, with most of that ($31 mil) going to software development costs for the web browser, like you’d expect.

They also spent $6 million on marketing (what happened to the touchy-feely open source ‘spread Firefox’ campaign?) and $9 million on general costs. $1 million was given away in grants and awards to other open-source projects. In total, Mozilla made $30 million USD, last year, not bad for a company who’s products are given away for free.

Ars Technica doesn’t want you to worry about Chrome. Although Google provides a large share of Mozilla’s profits, Google committed itself to its deal with Firefox through 2011. According to Wikipedia, Firefox (by far) has the largest market share of the non-Internet Explorer browsers.