Mozilla announced that it has signed a “significant and mutually
beneficial revenue agreement with Google”, which ends speculation that
Google could possibly moving on and not support Mozilla via the
browser’s search box and the integrated default Google search anymore.
Mozilla’s CEO, Gary Kovacs tweeted
that today is “great day for the Web” and wrote in a blog post that
“this new agreement extends our long term search relationship with
Google for at least three additional years.” Kovacs did not reveal the
financial terms of the agreement.
The previous 3-year contract defining the royalty agreement between
Mozilla and Google ended in November. Over the past three years,
Google’s Chrome browser gained substantial market share and recently
surpassed Mozilla’s Firefox, according to StatCounter. However, Firefox
market share is still around 25 percent and Google’s core business
depends on search engine advertising revenue. It is unlikely that Google
will be dropping those 25 percent of users and handing Microsoft and
opportunity to pick up Firefox users for Bing.
It is unclear how much Google paid in search royalties to Mozilla in
2011, but we know that Google paid 84 percent of all search royalties in
2010, $121.1 million in total, were paid by Google. However, Mozilla’s
market share was above 30 percent at that time, according to
StatCounter, and it is likely that Google has paid less in 2011. For
Mozilla, the renewal of the Google contract, is a way to end a not so
great year on a positive note.
Daniel Bailey in Business on December 20
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