There are some interesting behavioural economics experiments on "the power of free". Here is a decent overview: https://thedecisionlab.com/insights/business/imp

There are some interesting behavioural economics experiments on "the power of free". Here is a decent overview: https://thedecisionlab.com/insights/business/impact-free-consumer-decision-making/ https://thedecisionlab.com/insights/business/impact-free-con... In essence, people overvalue free goods. This means it is very hard for a paid product to compete against free goods, even when the paid product is itself cheap and better quality. This explains a lot about the state of the Internet, where a large number of eyeballs go to free products maintained by a large companies with other revenue streams or to low quality junk. It also makes me, unfortunately, doubtful that any efforts to directly monetize Firefox will be successful.