Firefox
Firefox is a great browser.

Open source, completely free and much more secure than the once all-powerful Internet Explorer. Since its 1.0 release back in 2004 it has made huge advances and currently holds at least 10% of the browser market with over 150 million downloads.

This growth can’t keep going for ever tho, its going to slow down over time, and with IE still being included with every copy of windows sold (which accounts for about 97% of computers in the world), its going to be hard to push firefox into the lead by just word-of-mouth.

firefox ad

That hasn’t stopped Mozilla from trying, though. They’ve run a full-page ad in the New York times and are currently letting the community create an advert on Firefox flicks which will hopefully be on TV soon.

But again, this only gets them so far. With IE already installed and working on the average pc, its going to be an uphill struggle from now on. Mozilla needs to provide something more with firefox, an incentive to install it, use it and spread it.

Last month it came to light that Google was paying Mozilla small amount of revenue for every ad clicked after searching in Firefox’s intergrated search bar, and Mozilla may have earned upwards of $72 million last year.

A huge amount of money if true and as firefoxs’ market share increases this figure can only get higher.

That’s a great way for Mozilla to increase their share of the browser market and speed up its growth! Offer a referral scheme. Passing on a share of the profit from ads to the person who installed firefox on that machine.

Just imagine, you sign up for spreadfirefox and then get a code to enter during the firefox installation. You install firefox on your friends and family machines and put in your spreadfirefox code. Everytime a user clicks an ad after googling in the firefox instance you installed you would get, say, 10% of the revenue that normally goes to Mozilla. This might only be 1 or 2 cents, but you get that every time an ad is clicked. The more copies of firefox you install, the more you get.

What better incentive to spredfirefox than to know you will get, say, 5 cents per day per installation. After 10 installations, you’re making $15 a month, 25 = $37.50, 50 = $75 etc.. the more you spread FF, the more you make.

Mozilla

This would also put Mozilla in such a great light with the open source community, actually giving cash rewards back to the community for helping to spread the word.

Another way that this referral scheme could benefit firefox would be that OEMs may jump on board, preinstalling Firefox with new PCs. They would possibly stand to make: $0.05 per day x 365 days per year x 5 for years = $91 per machine, effectively reducing their costs by that amount allowing them to either lower their costs or increase their profits, all the while expanding firefox’s market.

There is definitely potential in a scheme like this, for not only Mozilla but the whole open source community. It would seem that Google would be the ones to front the bill for all this increased profit sharing but Google charges the advertisers themselves for every click and with firefox increasing market share Google would also be able to increase its dominance.

Currently in Internet Explorer 6 there is no sign of Google, you have to know about it or find it yourself. In firefox Google is the default homepage and default search engine in the quicksearch bar.

The only question remains is that would Mozilla be comfortable giving up a percentage of its profits in the short term for better market share and greater profits in the long run? Everyone likes a quick buck and big business decisions often aim towards short term profits, will Mozilla kick the trend?

Digg this!

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