I bet the rest of the world knew this a while ago, but its news to me: 

Firefox (Mozilla Corporation/Mozilla Foundation) made $72M last year?! – The Jason Calacanis Weblog

UPDATE: I know a lot of folks are coming here from DIGG and other memetrackers. The $72M someone told me at BarCampLA and I have no idea if that is true or not. If you reblog this (or report it) please make sure you make that clear.

The best piece of information I got out of BarCampLA was that Firefox, which is produced by the for-profit Mozilla Corporation, made $72M last year and is on target to have 120 employees this year. I have no idea if this is true (anyone?), but it makes sense. I mean, there have to be 72M people using Firefox out there, and making $1 a year seems low to me! Mark Pincus brought this topic up recently.

Mozilla Corporation makes all that money because of the Google Search box on the top right. If you search with that box (which I do all day long) and you click on the Google ads on the results page Firefox gets ~80% of that. They also have Amazon in the search box, and other services that I’m sure kick them back some affiliate fees. Brilliant.