Firefox Affiliate Branding

One of the conversations I had quite a bit at the Firefox Summit was around affiliate branding and my belief that Mozilla should be doing more to allow for custom versions of Firefox for a particular brand. Brand Thunder, a company I’m working with, is publishing a case study that backs up this belief. If you don’t know what Brand Thunder does, they produce custom themes and extensions for brands. So for instance, if you love the Washington Capitals, you can install their custom browser theme for Firefox.

What Brand Thunder has determined is that after the Capitals made the Firefox theme available, the number of visitors to the Capitals website using Firefox went up, and Firefox marketshare couldn’t account for all of it.

We don’t want to give away all the facts that are found in the case study, but one that we’re proud of is we doubled the penetration of Firefox usage on the Capitals web site. OK, we’ll give Firefox its due since it saw 40% growth over that period of time (growing from 16% to 19% over the time frame analyzed). Even giving Firefox credit for a 40% lift, that still leaves 60% that looks an awful lot like Brand Thunder contribution.

So where’s the affiliate branding connection? The problem is that in order to use the Washington Capitals theme, people had to go get Firefox and install it. This step probably eliminated quite a few people. How many more Firefox users would there be if they could have simply downloaded a version of Firefox with the Washington Capitals extension and theme already installed?