Last year Firefox was able to boast $123 million in annual revenues- a whopping 84% of which actually came straight from Google. An impressive feat, especially when you take into consideration the fact that Mozilla is a non-profit organization.

While this is certainly a lot of money, it seems that the guys at Mozilla have just struck gold, as Google has had to up the ante to renew their contract with Mozilla, and this time for a cool $300 million a year.

So what does Google get in return for this large chunk of change? Google will remain to be the default search engine for the popular Mozilla Firefox web browser. So then, what could possibly have warranted such a hike in the price tag for the Mozilla agreement?Especially when you remember that Google Chrome is taking up more and more of Firefox’s market share by the day.

Why It’s Worth $300 Million

The reason Google had to pay such a premium was because there was competition for the same contract- both Microsoft and Yahoo! wanted in on the action.

Lately Microsoft has been paying a lot of money to help market the company’s search engine so that it can compete with Google and other search engines. Although studies have shown that their payment is paying off to an extent, in this case Microsoft was simply not able to match the offer that Google was prepared to pay, meaning that they are going to have to look for other alternatives to find more traffic to go to their search engine.

It is interesting to see that Google and Mozilla have come together to reach an agreement when they are two direct competitors- both of which combined represent approximately a quarter of the search engine market. So going forward, we Firefox users can expect to see Google stick around in our web browsing.