Ever wondered how Firefox has become such a feature-complete browser without the squadrons of paid programmers beavering away at the boring features?
ninemsn apc - How Firefox earns $US55million a year
[apcmag.com...]
Frank Schilling has a nice writeup about how that $55 million is earned...
Why would a browser make money at all? If people type an address they are expecting to get to a destination. But if you fat finger the .xom, .cpm, .con or other misspellings of GTLDs, your browser often steals that traffic away and points it to a Google page or Yahoo page where Google/Yahoo split the advertising revenue with browser manufacturer.
Firefox Makes 55mm A Year ... Significant Portion from Error Search?
[frankschilling.typepad.com...]
Air Traffic
Frank goes on to say...
NB to well meaning techie folks.. please don't tell me how you can "change the settings in your browser to draw another error page" because the vast majority of all Internet users don't understand this and they are the ones placing 55mm a year in the pockets of Firefox (and and 600mm to Microsoft) a nice clip of that at your expense.
Wow! That's a lot of money being made from mistyped GTLDs.
The article is talking about payments to Mozilla for searches done from the Firefox search box.
I believe there's a feature that will try to guess what you meant when you misspell a domain, but I've turned that off, as it's annoying.
NB to well meaning techie folks.. please don't tell me how you can "change the settings in your browser to draw another error page" because the vast majority of all Internet users don't understand this and they are the ones placing 55mm a year in the pockets of Firefox (and and 600mm to Microsoft) a nice clip of that at your expense.
I believe there's a feature that will try to guess what you meant when you misspell a domain, but I've turned that off, as it's annoying.
so there you go.
What's really scandalous is the flow of the money *after* it arrives at the mozilla *foundation*
thats where they are making money, pretty smart eh ..
