Safari for Windows -- follow the money

By Steven Rosenberg on June 12, 2007 5:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) |

Scot Hacker at O'Reilly Network thinks the real reason for Safari's port to Windows is because of the search bar. Since the searches generally go through Google, Apple gets a cut of the ad revenue generated by those queries.

O'Reilly's Hacker cites John Gruber for the following:

“It’s not widely publicized, but those integrated search bars in web browser toolbars are revenue generators. When you do a Google search from Safari’s toolbar, Google pays Apple a portion of the ad revenue from the resulting page. … The same goes for Mozilla (and, I presume, just about every other mainstream browser.) … For example, the Mozilla Foundation earned over $50 million in search engine ad revenue in 2005, mostly from Google. … Apple is currently generating about $2 million per month from Safari’s Google integration. That’s $25 million per year. If Safari for Windows is even moderately successful, it’s easy to see how that might grow to $100 million per year or more.“

Money -- it's what's for dinner. Not that there's anything wrong with it. (Insert your own cliche here).

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