No subscription, no annual charges, no service fee, a completely free of cost browsing platform – Web Browsers! Using web browsers and not paying anything to avail services. Have you ever wondered why they never ask for money to use them? How do they make money?
Web browsers earn their revenue from ads, sponsored home page contents, donations & royalty.
Browsers like Google Chrome earn from Ads shown in their own search engine Google and web pages, Whereas Microsoft Edge does the same by using Bing. Other Browsers like Firefox, Safari etc earn most of their revenue from royalty fees offered by google to make google as their default search engine. Additionally they also earn from donations and sponsored home page content as well.
Google uses Ad-sense to generate a significant amount of revenue. Google charges advertisers on a per click basis where google only keeps 32% of cost per click. But with only this 32% of share google generates its major income from Advertisement.
According to the Annual Report, in 2020 Google’s parent company Alphabet made a revenue of 183 billion dollar out of which around 80% revenue that is approx 147 dollar came from Ads, and Google Chrome is their main source of advertisement.
With so much revenue, google is able to give a pretty good amount of royalty fees to Safari & Firefox to keep using google as their default search engine for year and year.
How much does Google pay Apple to be the default search engine?
In the financial year 2020 google has paid around 10 billion dollar to apple to keep using google as their default search engine. Another deal of 15 billion dollars has been settled between these two tech giants to remain Google as their primary search engine for the year 2021.
Experts also say the price for keeping google as default search engine for safari will increase further in 2022.
How much does Google pay Firefox to be the default search engine?
ZDNet has reported that Google and Firefox have agreed a deal of around 400 – 450 million dollar per year to keep using google as Firefox’s default search engine. This deal has been finalized for three years, from 2021 to 2023. Most of Mozilla’s revenue comes from search engine companies’ royalty fees.
Market share of Top Four Browsers : Who is the winner?
Let’s quickly look into the global market share of Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox & Microsoft Edge.
| Browser Name | Year 2021 | Year 2020 | Year 2019 | Year 2018 | Year 2017 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google Chrome | 64.45% | 64.6% | 63.31% | 59.12% | 53.96% |
| Apple Safari | 18.9% | 17.84% | 15.86% | 14.43% | 14.51% |
| Mozilla Firefox | 3.59% | 4.22% | 4.57% | 5.21% | 6.19% |
| Microsoft Edge | 3.62% | 1.38% | 2.14% | 1.95% | 1.85% |
| Others | 9.44% | 11.96% | 14.12% | 19.29% | 23.49% |
From the above table we are clearly seeing Google Chrome is clearly dominating in the industry with a market share of 64.45% in the year 2021.
Increasing in number of iOS users is also directly impacting the significant increase in Safari Browser usage. Stats jump from 14.51% to 18.9% in the last five years.
The transformation from Edge Legacy to Microsoft Edge also increased the worldwide market share of Microsoft Edge.
However, With the current data we have showing Firefox’s market share curve is strictly downgrading with the time, Firefox should keep an eye on it and act accordingly.
The Conclusion
Nothing is actually free in this world. There is a famous quote “if you are getting something for free then you are the product”. Same happens in case of Web Browsers. We consumers are the primary source of their revenue.
However Safari and Firefox earn primarily from royalty fees but Google is only able to provide this huge amount of royalty because of their Ad revenue. So indirectly all the browsers that have google as their default search engine generating their primary revenue from Ads. However using an Ad blocker always impacts their revenue.
