I’m at UTR listening to the Browster talk. Interesting to note that they say FireFox is taking in $72M in revenue. Can someone explain how that money is distributed? There’s a for-profit company involved but they’re also a non-profit so I’m not sure I grok what’s happening here.
Pushback time. It looks like they’re replacing Adsense on websites with their own. Not cool guys. You’re stealing.
Browster doesn’t get it. Bad bad bad company IMO. They’ve paid no attention to Internet history. They’re doing some really evil stuff. They’re pre-fetching link URLs from all search results. This doesn’t scale. They’re hurting publishers. They’re also stealing ad revenue from sites by replacing ads. Not not cool.
I wonder what User-Agent their using. I’ll probably block them from Tailrank.
Update: They seriously don’t get it. They run on Internet Explorer! My god. They run on FireFox too apparently. (See update 2)
Update 2:
Browster was cool enough to chime in and correct me on a few issues. They have Firefox support (which is cool of course). They also claim that they’re not replacing ads on sites but I sware I recall a discussion on this during the panel. Maybe someone else present at the talk can clarify. I was running on about 3 hours of sleep so I might not have an objective perspective.
I still think the link pre-fetching is very problematic and troublesome especially for a default install.
My advice to these guys is to innovate faster than Flock. They’re going to be a bit slow moving towards on 1.0 which I think is their achilles heal. If Browster cut a deal with Yahoo search they can get some referral traffic and start to make some serious revenue.
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March 2, 2006 at 8:09 pm
These guys were presenting at DEMO@15 when my company, Digipede, was attending. They received similar coverage and criticism at the time; I had forgotten about them until your post.
I think it interesting that the rules of monetization of content are certainly in flux; however, replacing ads is unambiguously wrong.
March 2, 2006 at 10:56 pm
“These guys were presenting at DEMO@15 when my company, Digipede, was attending. They received similar coverage and criticism at the time; I had forgotten about them until your post.”
Wow. Thats crazy because at UTR they said they received “no pushback” on this issue. I was trying not to be too negative but all the pushback happened and was settled before their company was created.
“I think it interesting that the rules of monetization of content are certainly in flux; however, replacing ads is unambiguously wrong.”
Yeah.. of course… way uncool!
March 3, 2006 at 12:26 am
As I understand it:
Mozilla Corporation is a for-profit company — subject like other for-profit companies to income taxes and the duty to be responsible to its shareholders.
However, it’s 100% owned by Mozilla Foundation, a 501(c)3 non-profit, which like similar non-profits can accept tax-deductible donations and must remain exclusively responsible to its stated public-interest mission.
The split is apparently due to difficulties maintaining non-profit requirements if you’re taking in as much money via commercial activities as Mozilla software now earns. By introducing the legal separation, the Corp’s books can be kept like a commerical corporation, paying usual taxes, maximizing “profit”.
But then all of the after-tax profit goes as dividends to the Foundation, which doesn’t pay taxes but has to devote all monies to their public mission.
The foundation disclaims any plan to sell shares to others, so there’s no other person/company/mission in the loop, but the arm’s length legal arrangement keeps things legitimate with the tax authorities.
March 3, 2006 at 9:21 am
Kevin,
thanks for your note about Browster and for attending my presentation at UTR. Somehow there’s a misconception here.
- Browster does not replace a page’s ads with its own. Try the current 1.5 on our site and you’ll see no ads at all(and it will speed up your searching and browsing! :-). A previous version reserved a space at the top for ads, above our toolbar, similar to Opera, a well respected and widely used Google ad-supported browser.
- Browster supports Firefox. The UTR event was hosted by Miscrosft on their campus, so I felt it only right to present on IE and show us working on MSN as well as Google.
Also note that we’re embracing the Open Source concept, but for product feature design, called Open Design. This is a new initiative in the spririt of the new user-driven web.
http://www.browster.com/open.htm
Would love to get your feedback about Browster’s usability and how you think it compares to tabs as a way to make browsing more efficient.
As for Firefox’s revenue. They get paid by Google everytime you do a search in the Firefox built-in search box. They were bringing in so much cash (~3M/mo. at the time) they decided in mid ’05 they needed to create a private entity to better manage the business outside of .org rules. So Mozilla became a corporation under the Foundation.
http://www.mozilla.com/about/
Thanks,
Scott Milener
CEO
Browster
415-726-3036
March 3, 2006 at 10:49 am
Hey Scott.
Thanks for the feedback and taking the high ground :)
- Regarding ad replacement. I’m sorry. I must not have followed because I thought there was discussion back and forth on this with the panel. Anyway. If you’re not doing that then this is cool and you should really have to worry about backlash obviously.
- Ah… Regarding IE vs Firefox for some reason I didn’t see this on your site when I went to download the product.
The prefetching issue is a controversial one and I think its been settled for most part.
http://firefox.blogcarnival.com/archives/2005/04/more_controvers.html
Its very problematic. The google fetch #1 result is probably not tooooo bad since there’s a near 100% chance that you’ll click that link.
Anyway.. my point being that the net will melt if more than say 10% of the people did this.
I’ll update the post with your notes so it doesn’t appear as negative.
Onward!