Background

The success of the iPhone App store in terms of creating developer interest in supporting that platform (due to stories of top app developers making $100K or more per month) is clearly an existence proof for both consumers’ willingness to pay small amounts to enhance their user experience and developers going to where the money is (i.e., 100,000+ high quality apps developed in less than one year). However, Firefox users (who unlike phone users aren’t conditioned to pay for anything) will probably need to be eased into such a Paid Marketplace system if it is going to be successful enough to really reward Add-on developers beyond the current $1K per month peak revenue levels being seen by a handful of top Add-on developers who are asking for Contributions via Paypal.

The Idea

In the Q&A after the keynote, it was suggested that such a Paid Marketplace might be jump-started by having Mozilla return to its users a portion of the SearchBox revenue that these users have enabled Mozilla to earn in the form of UserPoints (or KarmaPoints or Zillas or FireChips whatever). Assuming 100 UserPoints were given to every Firefox user every month, the existing Add-on Contribution system could be easily modified to allow users to make donations with either Paypal Cash or Mozilla UserPoints. All un-donated UserPoints each month would be automatically contributed to the mix of Add-ons actually in use (based on anonymous system-wide Add-on usage stats). To give them value to developers, it was suggested that these UserPoints could be backed by an actual cash-out pool that was funded by a portion of Mozilla’s SearchBox revenue.

More Information

1. The key to the idea is that it would support, but not rely on, user-directed contributions of a pre-funded amount of virtual currency (e.g., possibly called “UserPoints”) that users would donate on a monthly basis to their favorite Add-ons.
2. To ensure that all “un-donated” UserPoints are fully deployed at the end of each month a pre-defined formula (based on system-wide, Add-on usage stats) would be used to ensure 100% of the users who have benefited from installing and using at least one add-on for at least one month participate.
3. To make the ecosystem more than just a sophisticated Add-on rating system, Mozilla would agree to cash out any developer’s Add-on’s accumulated UserPoints on a monthly basis from a pool of funds that would be replenished each month with a portion of the revenue that Firefox end users generate for Mozilla by using the default browser SearchBox.

I’d love to get your feedback on this idea.