Why owning the end user is profitable – lessons from Axiom and Google

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I’m a Firefox user. I say that with pride and shame.

Pride because I’ve stayed loyal to a browser that once upon a time was the “cool” alternative to Internet Explorer.

Shame because I know the world has moved on to Chrome.

The irony is that despite my “loyalty” to Firefox, it only exists thanks to Chrome.

85% of the Mozilla Foundation’s revenue ($570 million) comes from a revenue-sharing agreement with Google, where Mozilla takes a share of ad revenue generated by Google searches from Firefox users.

Google also pays out billions to OEMs like Samsung, Motorola and AT&T to ensure Chrome (and Google Search) is preinstalled on their hardware devices.

It’s the price Google pays for maintaining the browser’s dominant (~70%) market share.

It was also always the plan. During Chrome’s 2008 launch, Sundar Pichai stated upfront that Google’s core business depends on dominating the browser market.

If Google doesn’t control the browser market, less people are Googling, which means less ad revenue.

In other words, it all comes down to owning the end user.

Now Chrome’s decades-long dominance may be facing its first-ever serious competitive threat.

A slew of AI-first browsers, notably Perplexity’s recently-announced Comet, are looking to reinvent the browser experience.

Based on all the information our browsers know about us — our history, bookmarks, credentials, web behavior — AI-first browsers like Comet can become an “active participant” and “embedded” part of our workflows, Delphi’s Can Gurel pointed out in “Browser Wars Got Personal.”

If a browser-integrated AI agent can find and make restaurant reservations for me, I no longer need Google.

Again, it comes down to owning the end user.

Crypto isn’t an exception to this rule. A similar phenomenon is playing out in Solana’s memecoin land.

Of late, Pump has been losing market share to LetsBonk — putting out $229 million in trading volumes compared to LetsBonk’s $1.1 billion in the last week.

Pump’s revenues have seen a steep decline.

Yet while order-flow volumes are bouncing between Pump and LetsBONK, it doesn’t affect the revenues of the dominant trading bot Axiom.

That’s because while memecoins are launched on Pump or LetsBonk, degen traders are in Axiom’s frontend UI.

Launchpad bonding curves are permissionless, so Axiom simply looks at every new token, detects which launchpad contract it came from and builds a buy/sell button around it.