Website Marketing Directory — Search Engine Optimisation — Melbourne, Sydney, Australia

Many people seem to have been surprised last week when Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker revealed that the "bulk" of the organization's $52.9m revenue in calendar 2005 came from "search engine relationships" — which in effect means the money Google hands over for being the default search engine in Firefox's standard search query tool, plus some small change for recommending the Google Toolbar.

If people thought the 2005 number was big, I think they'll be blown over when this year's figure finally comes to light. The sums Google is now paying out to Mozilla and other traffic-acquisition partners are so large that last quarter it started breaking them out into a separate line item in its financial report: the figure was $45 million, just for the quarter.

Firefox's query box defaults to GoogleThat small query box with the Google 'G' alongside has already guaranteed Mozilla's future for several years to come, generating far more than the organization actually needs on an annual basis to fund continued development of Firefox. But here's an interesting thought: it's not an ad. It's simply preferential placement for a link that invokes a third-party service.

I keep on being reminded of this by the new 'Skype extension for Firefox', which Skype auto-installed (with my permission) shortly after I upgraded to Firefox 2.0 over the holidays. All the phone numbers in the Web pages I visit now appear as click-to-call Skype buttons. Having all those buttons in front of me is a great advertisement for Skype — but each individual button is not an advertisement, it's a direct link to the Skype service. I can't help wondering how much money Mozilla could make if it struckSkype's Firefox extension in action a deal to make the Skype extension a default option, and took a micropayment every time a call was placed using one of those Skype buttons.

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