Google Paid $7.2 Billion Last Year To Partners, Including Apple, To Prominently Showcase Its Search Engine and Apps on Smartphones (bloomberg.com) 57
A reader shares a Bloomberg report: There's a $19 billion black box inside Google. That's the yearly amount Google pays to companies that help generate its advertising sales, from the websites lined with Google-served ads to Apple and others that plant Google's search box or apps in prominent spots. Investors are obsessed with this money, called traffic acquisition costs, and they're particularly worried about the growing slice of those payments going to Apple and Google's Android allies. That chunk of fees now amounts to 11 percent of revenue for Google's internet properties. The figure was 7 percent in 2012. These Google traffic fees are the result of contractual arrangements parent company Alphabet makes to ensure its dominance. The company pays Apple to make Google the built-in option for web searches on Apple's Safari browsers for Mac computers, iPhones and other places. Google also pays companies that make Android smartphones and the phone companies that sell those phones to make sure its search box is front and center and to ensure its apps such as YouTube and Chrome are included in smartphones. In the last year, Google has paid these partners $7.2 billion, more than three times the comparable cost in 2012.
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They are paying the end user. They're paying them in web search services, email services, calendar services and all the other "free" products the offer.
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Hey whatca doing there? Using balanced reasoning? That isn't the Slashdot way. Companies must not make any money at all, All services need to be free open source, collect no information about you, be easy enough for any slob to use it and have no advertisements. These companies must also pay all the people who work there a fair salary for their location, and treat everyone like a god. And they better not take in any money from the government, because if that was the case, then they are obviously dealing w
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Companies must not make any money at all, All services need to be free open source, collect no information about you, be easy enough for any slob to use it and have no advertisements.
You forgot "a web facing API with no checks or balances so it can easily be monetized by third parties"...
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yes, what people get are "a few colorful beads"
https://youtu.be/JJ1yS9JIJKs?t... [youtu.be]
Interesting to know ... (Score:5, Interesting)
... and very informative, but not earth-shattering.
Sounds like a good business model for all concerned, except Google competitors.
Those companies could pony up if they think there's a decent ROI.
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Wealthy companies are paying wealthy companies a lot of money, in a mutual beneficial way. Because we are suppose to hate capitalism, so we must be outraged.
However how is this hurting the customer? It is a bit annoying if I wanted a different search engine by default, but for the most part it is easy to change, they are not even paying to have Google as the only option, just the default one. 72 billion to set a default flag to 1.
A few years ago Yahoo was the default search engine on my phone... I didn't
Re:So all of you asking where the evidence is (Score:5, Insightful)
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How is Google a monopoly? If I were to use Bing I would be able to do nearly everything that Google has. This is even less outrageous then Norton being preloaded, because all it is a default that we could easily switch to a list of competitors available. On the iPhone, I have Google, Yahoo, BIng and DuckDuckGo as options.
Having IE installed and inseparable from Windows is a much different problem. Because you were forced to use the product, even if you didn't want to, every time you open a file explorer,
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How is Google a monopoly? If I were to use Bing I would be able to do nearly everything that Google has.
I can vouch for that, as I actually do use Bing as my primary search engine. I started as an experiment and I just never turned it off. Google is still superior for some things (mainly, its index seems to be more up-to-the-minute) but for the most part I don't even notice that I'm using Bing and there's nothing that keeps pulling me back over to Google (hence, no monopoly).
Re:So all of you asking where the evidence is (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: So all of you asking where the evidence is (Score:2)
No. It isnâ(TM)t. Having funds to pay for that isnâ(TM)t abusing position or monopolistic. Iâ(TM)m sure a hedge fund could drum up a competitor and make the same payments no problem, just pony up the capital. The real dilemma to competitions is convincing Apple brass that your new search engine is worthy to their users. If itâ(TM)s not, no amount of money will suffice. They just ditched bing in Siri for that reason, and Microsoft had a fortune to make that work.
Re: So all of you asking where the evidence is (Score:2)
Yup, sorry. I didnâ(TM)t think a citation was needed:
âoeSwitching to Google as the web search provider for Siri, Search within iOS and Spotlight on Mac will allow these services to have a consistent web search experience with the default in Safari,â reads an Apple statement sent this morning. âoeWe have strong relationships with Google and Microsoft and remain committed to delivering the best user experience possible.â
From: here [slashdot.org]
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Many markets have a pretty tall entry cost, that in isolation isn't a real barrier. If there was some super-profitable thing you could do but only if you were a billion dollar company then you'd quickly see many investors pile up their savings to get over that hurdle. The problem is more game theoretic, if you're a giant fighting a upstart threatening a small part of your business it's easy to sacrifice that profit in order to either drive them out of business or at least strangle their growth. While outrig
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it's hard to grow to being a huge search engine company if someone else is the default on all of the popular platforms.
No...It's hard to build a huge search engine company because building a good search engine is really fucking hard. Back in the days when search engines were really simple, they sucked. It takes years and years of work to tune your search algorithms to help people find what they want -- not what some spammer wants them to find. And because spammers constantly adapt and defeat every new countermeasure you add, it's a constant, expensive as fuck battle that you can't just hire some random code monkeys to fight
Just the opposite. (Score:3)
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Actually, they do.
First, retailers are adapting to an Amazon world, and you have to realize when you walk into the store, you are not the customer. The manufacturer is, and they paid for their product to be put on the rack in a certain way. It's obvious if you look for a tell-tale sign like
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This is abuse of dominance in a market. That's as plain as it gets.
I disagree. This is just marketing.
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How is this not good news? (Score:4, Interesting)
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What is better than the default messaging one?
I prefer QK SMS, which is open source, and has a better UI than the default one.
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I'd rather that the vendor provided the best mail app, the best calendar app, the best search engine, and so on, rather than the one where the provider paid them the most money.
Really? And who decides what is best? What criteria do they use? The best app is the one YOU think is the best. The only way for you to know that is to try them all. This doesn't have to be like religion where you pick the one in the country you were born in!
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Really? And who decides what is best? What criteria do they use?
The manufacturer chooses, and reviewers then compare them and customers try multiple ones. If all Android phones ship with the same Google apps, then this isn't a point of differentiation. If all of them converged on Google apps because that was what the majority of customers wanted, then that would be one thing, but if they all converge on Google apps because Google pays them then that's very different.
Spend even more! (Score:3)
The more money Google spends on this sort of thing, the less they'll have available to spend on doing their evil stuff.
Other priorities (Score:2)
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It doesn't sound strange at all -- I do exactly this.
If your phone has an unlocked bootloader, or has a crack available to unlock the bootloader, you can achieve what you want by installing one of the many 3rd party Android ROMs. None of those come with Google Apps -- you have to download and install them as a separate step, so it's entirely optional.
As a bonus, doing so means that you're no longer dependent on your carrier to push updates to you.
There are some apps that won't run if you don't have Google A