Google deal scores Mozilla $300m per year

Mozilla's big reliance on Google might actually be worth it — up to the point of US$300 million per year.

The search-engine giant is reportedly paying the Firefox maker US$300 million per year under the new three-year search deal.

AllThingsD has reported that the payoff, close to US$1 billion for all three years, "was the minimum revenue guarantee for delivering search queries garnered from consumers using Firefox".

When the agreement was announced first on Tuesday, financial terms were not disclosed, except that it would provide "a significant and mutually beneficial revenue" stream for both parties. If Mozilla is getting this amount as part of the bargain, it will be just as interesting to see what Google can do with this opportunity, as well.

This will also make matters significantly more competitive in the search market against Yahoo and Microsoft's mutual search agreement.

Other search engines that sit below Google within the Firefox browser are Yahoo, Bing, Amazon.com, eBay and Wikipedia.

Even before Google and Mozilla renewed their agreement this week, ensuring that Google would be the default search engine on Firefox, it was questionable how much Mozilla should be relying on Google for its revenue.

After all, it was revealed that Google contributed approximately 84 per cent of Mozilla's $123 million in revenue last year.

But it is apparently paying off, at least in the short term, as it effectively triples Mozilla's revenue for the next few years.

Via ZDNet US