Having selected participants for the pilot of its Promoted Add-ons program, Mozilla has started to review their extensions. As a result Verified badges have begun to appear on Firefox Extensions. 

The idea of Promoted Add-Ons is to open up a new revenue stream for Mozilla by charging devs a fee for reviewing the Firefox Extensions that they have crafted and made available for download from AMO - addons.mozilla.org. During the invitation-only pilot, Mozilla is reviewing a limited number of apps for free.

So far just twelve apps sport the Verified badge - a green tick plus the word Verified. The most popular of these, with over a million users each are the coupons site Honey and AdBlock for Firefox with star ratings of 4.6 and 4.3 respectively from existing users. These apps really don't need the help of badges - but those further down the list will probably benefit:

But would their developers benefit enough to want to pay Mozilla to review them? As Mozilla hasn't yet announced the fee it will charge we will have to wait and see.

What might make devs part with their cash is the stick rather than the carrot. This is the notice that potential users will see when they download apps that have not been reviewed:

Unfortunately, as we reported last month, the review process is open only to countries from which Mozilla can accept payment, which leaves a lot of apps automatically excluded from the privilege of paying for a review. 

Having you app verified is the pre-requisite for paying an additional fee for having your app promoted in a Sponsored section of the AMO homepage. This hasn't yet made its debut and meanwhile the page displays Recommended apps. These are ones that, prior to the Promoted App Program, were curated free of charge by Mozilla's reviewers and awarded the Recommended badge, a trophy on an orange background. This badge will continue to be used and apps that have earned it will continue to be featured.

On the Add-Ons Search page, users can now filter by Badging, where one of the options is By Firefox. The new badge,  a Firefox logo in red, is reserved for add-ons created by Mozilla itself and there are four extensions to which is is applied:

Is there any scope for Mozilla to make money from this scheme?

Currently there are 488,091 items listed in AMO. The vast majority of these (466,212) are themes and of them 36 have Recommended badges. Of the 21,513 extensions, 98 have Recommended badges. So, yes, a high demand for both the Verified badge and for Sponsored promotion probably exists.

More Information

New add-on badges

AMO Homepage

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