CNet: Future of Ad-Funded Applications

The bulk of Mozilla's (makers of Firefox) $52.9M of 2005 revenue came from Google and other search engines paying to be the default options on Firefox. CNet predicts: "Less and less is going to be coming from conventional advertising, which in any case is such an old-fashioned and long-winded process: click on an ad, reach a landing page, get some information, ask some questions, maybe in the end place an order. Instead, vendors will embed direct links to paid services in their applications, and they'll get a share of the revenue earned when users click on those services. [...] I foresee a time when revenue sharing for service placement will become a far bigger source of indirect funding than plain old advertising."