While Firefox usage grew 50 percent

Nov 20, 2009 14:20 GMT  ·  By

For a non-profit organization, the Mozilla Foundation is doing pretty well financially, better than many for-profit web companies are doing these days. The organization has released some financial details for 2008, saying that revenue has reached $79 million percent in the last year, up five percent from the previous one. It's not exactly clear why it would release the numbers in November 2009, but what is clear is that revenue growth is slowing down after revenue increased by 12 percent from 2006 to 2007.

“Our revenue and expenses are consistent with 2007, showing steady growth. Mozilla’s consolidated reported revenues (Mozilla Foundation and all subsidiaries) for 2008 were $78.6 million, up approximately 5% from 2007 reported revenues of $75.1 million. The majority of this revenue is generated from the search functionality in Mozilla Firefox from organizations such as Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, and others,” Mozilla Foundation chairwoman Mitchell Baker said in her annual “state of Mozilla” letter.

Firefox has had a good year in 2008, so this isn't the reason for the slow down, rather the organization has seen some pretty heavy losses at its investment portfolio. The Mozilla Foundation lost about $7.8 million on long-term investments, about 25 percent of the portfolio's worth. Excluding this though, it actually did pretty well with operating revenue at $86.4 million up 18 percent from 2007's $73.3 million.

2008 was a big year for Mozilla with several important moves, some of which, it claims, will pay out in the future. It launched the Mozilla Messaging in early 2008 to handle Thunderbird and other products in the field and the group is now getting ready to release Thunderbird 3. It was also a year of strong growth for Firefox, the company's best-known product and its main revenue source, as the browser went from 49 million daily users in 2007 to 75 million. The browser now reaches 110 million people every day, about 25 percent of the market.