DuckDuckGo FOSS Donations 2010

http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2011/02/duckduckgo-foss-donations-2010.html

by jordanmessina • 15 years ago

93 26 15 years ago

gabrielweinberg.com

karl11• 15 years ago

At 10% of gross revenue, these donations would indicate DDG pulled in ~$19,090 in 2010.

chamakits• 15 years ago

I was thinking this exact same thing, and I really hope that isn't the case, as they are pretty awesome.

epi0Bauqu2• 15 years ago

It's right. You expected more?

burgerbrain• 15 years ago

It is my impression that the operator is already in money, he's doing this for the hell of it.

robryan• 15 years ago

It's pretty good considering that many startups are burning through VC money at this stage in their lives and the competition it is up against. Sure it could be more aggressively monetized, but if is bringing in enough to cover expenses why not focus on building a user base rather than cashing in.

stanleydrew• 15 years ago

This means the $7000 billboard on the 101 in San Francisco was a significant portion of revenue. Gabriel, looking back on that, do you think it was worth it, and would you advise other startups to try it given similar revenue numbers?

epi0Bauqu2• 15 years ago

Absolutely.

rudiger• 15 years ago

I'm reminded of the only time Twitter ever spent money on marketing (SXSW 2007)[1]. They negotiated with the festival to put flat panel screens in the hallways. They paid $11,000 for this and set up the TVs themselves.

[1] http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-process-involved-in-launchi...

ashleyw• 15 years ago

I'd say most of the traffic came indirectly via press who covered the story, rather than the actual billboard itself. It's been done, and I don't think the press will cover the same story twice, so don't expect the same results DDG had.

avar2• 15 years ago

This is fantastic, too bad you'd never see something like this from a company on the stock market.

axod3• 15 years ago

I'm pretty sure hundreds of large companies make donations, allow employees time to work on FOSS, and so on.

Still awesome to see duckduckgo do it of course.

Matt_Cutts• 15 years ago

I like Google's Summer of Code program http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code . If you can get programmers writing open-source code when they're still students, a fair number of them might continue to contribute to open source over their career.

I really like Gabriel's idea too. Donations to open-source (or groups like the EFF) are great for the net.

avar2• 15 years ago

They make donations. But they don't donate 10% of their yearly revenue, even though their business often completely depends on FOSS software.

salvadors• 15 years ago

http://investor.realnetworks.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=8910...

"In periods where we achieve profitability, we intend to donate 5% of our net income to charitable organizations, which will reduce our net income for those periods."

callahad• 15 years ago

Yet another great reason to use DDG. Similarly, Gandi's support of Debian is a major reason I use them for all of my domain registrations.

dotBen• 15 years ago

I'm not sure what Gabriel's aspirations are for raising venture capital in the future, but abstracting this out...

I'm wondering whether a VC would have concerns about investing in a startup that had already made such a public commitment.

jdp23• 15 years ago

Great question. I'm working on finding that out myself.

jjm• 15 years ago

I donated money AND sweat to half of these projects in addition to several others personally, before I went and started my startup.

I hope people contribute outside of their 'corporate profits' both monetarily and with some elbow grease.

cperciva• 15 years ago

For the past two years I've donated all of Tarsnap's profits for December to the FreeBSD Foundation. (Considerably more than 1/12th of the annual profits, due to Tarsnap's growth -- last year it worked out to 15%.)

Good to see that I'm not alone. :-)

DuckDuckGo FOSS Donations 2010

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