You may know Opera Software as the Norwegian developer behind your Opera desktop browser or the Opera browser on your mobile phone. What you may not know is how Opera makes money, money it needs to pay for the software developers it employs, or for those servers that shrink down your traffic when you turn Opera Turbo on.
I myself have often wondered how Opera makes money. I know that Google for example makes money from advertising and that Mozilla makes money by keeping Google the default search engine in Firefox. I also know that other free applications make money by bundling toolbars and other applications. But Opera doesn’t bundle toolbars or other things of the sort. So, how does Opera make money?
SPONSORED LINKS
Community Manager with Opera Software, Espen Andre Øverdahl, explained that Opera Software has two different revenue models, one for the embedded markets and one for the desktop market. Here are the details he shared on these revenue models:
1. For the Internet embedded market, we receive revenue as a mix of engineering fees, maintenance fees and shares of sales income. The balance varies from contract to contract. This model accounts for the majority of Opera’s income. 2. For the desktop market, we derive revenue from our free products through revenue sharing with partners. For example, several search engines make usage payments to us for searches made by you (Opera users). This is the major source of income for Opera’s desktop browser, with revenue shares also in place on a variety of mobile products.
“How does Opera make money?” is one of two questions the developer always gets. The second one is “how tall is Jon von Tetzchner?”, Opera co-founder. The answer to that one is quite simple – he’s about 6.5feet or 2meters tall.
Additional info on how Opera makes money is available here.
You may know Opera Software as the Norwegian developer behind your Opera desktop browser or the Opera browser on your mobile phone. What you may not know is how Opera makes money, money it needs to pay for the software developers it employs, or for those servers that shrink down your traffic when you turn Opera Turbo on. 