Mozilla had ended its global agreement with Google at the end of 2014, moving on to regional deals with other search engine makers such as Yahoo, China’s Baidu, and Russia’s Yandex. In 2014 alone, Mozilla earned over $330 million, in revenues, using this deal. Mozilla switched away from Google towards the end of a year ago.
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This is why, Mozilla has expanded its partnership with Yandex, Yahoo and Baidu in different localities. In an interview with CNET, Mozilla’s chief legal and business officer Denelle Dixon-Thayer said that Firefox’s revenue future is brighter than before.
It may appear as if Mozilla is going to be fine, even if they don’t have the millions of dollars of revenue that they earned at one point because of Google. “It goes back to our strategy of how we can encourage more competition”, the statement continued. It has been reported that in the United States, Yahoo Inc, is showing Google Search results for some queries, which means Google still manages to get the privilege in Firefox without paying for it.
We’re not certain why Mozilla is no longer making money from Google, but it doesn’t seem to be an issue since the company seems confident of the amount of money it expects to make this year.
Jim Cook, Mozilla’s Chief Financial Officer, revealed that the company expected to rake in even more revenue this year due to strong search deals with other partners.
He said that 2015 is going to show their continuous improvement with strong financials.
However, the Firefox for iOS browser will not have the flexibility for Mozilla, as they have to follow Apple’s rules to launch browser apps by adhering to the “core Apple browser technology” policy.
In some ways, Mozilla wants to promote net neutrality by ensuring that tech giants such as Apple and Google (who run the Safari and Chrome browsers respectively) do not give preference to results which unnecessarily favor the giants.
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Mozilla has dabbled in the smartphone market itself with a Firefox operating system which was originally aimed at providing low-priced devices for developing markets, but developing markets remained unimpressed and with initiatives such as Android One proving far more successful, the company has backpedalled in favour of the platform aimed at “enthusiasts” much more in keeping with the style of Raspberry Pi. Cook said, “We really look forward to displaying our results next year”.
