Google's Next Big Money Maker Could Be the Maps on Your Phone (bloomberg.com) 86
Google became the world's most profitable internet company on the back of search advertising. Now, it's turning another popular web service into a major cash machine. From a report: Google Maps is an indispensable part of life for more than 1 billion people, who use it to commute, explore new cities or find a hot new restaurant. The service has been mostly free, and free from ads, since it launched 14 years ago.
Interviews with Google executives and customers show this is changing as the internet giant increases the ways advertisers can reach Maps users, while raising prices for some businesses that use the underlying technology. The app now regularly highlights sponsored locations, and shows extra paid listings when people look for nearby gas stations, coffee shops or other businesses. "There's a big opportunity for them to ramp up monetization," said Andy Taylor, associate director of research at digital marketing agency Merkle. "They've been slow-playing it."
"Sometimes I say the most under-monetized asset that I cover is Google Maps," Brian Nowak, an analyst at Morgan Stanley, said while interviewing Google's business chief Philipp Schindler at a recent conference. "It's almost like a utility where it's kind of waiting for you to flip the switch on." Schindler's response showed that Google isn't waiting anymore.
Interviews with Google executives and customers show this is changing as the internet giant increases the ways advertisers can reach Maps users, while raising prices for some businesses that use the underlying technology. The app now regularly highlights sponsored locations, and shows extra paid listings when people look for nearby gas stations, coffee shops or other businesses. "There's a big opportunity for them to ramp up monetization," said Andy Taylor, associate director of research at digital marketing agency Merkle. "They've been slow-playing it."
"Sometimes I say the most under-monetized asset that I cover is Google Maps," Brian Nowak, an analyst at Morgan Stanley, said while interviewing Google's business chief Philipp Schindler at a recent conference. "It's almost like a utility where it's kind of waiting for you to flip the switch on." Schindler's response showed that Google isn't waiting anymore.
Go on. (Score:5, Insightful)
Fuck up your best thing going, see who replaces you.
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I wouldn't call it their 'best thing going', it's been massively bloated for quite some time now. You shouldn't need a quad-core 3GHz processor just to look at a fucking map.
You shouldn't need a computer at all to look at a fucking map. Ironically, that doesn't compute for anyone under the age of 30.
God help the technoaddicts if GPS goes down. The wanderlost masses will look worse than a zombie horde playing Pokemon Go.
Re:Go on. (Score:5, Insightful)
I wouldn't call it their 'best thing going', it's been massively bloated for quite some time now. You shouldn't need a quad-core 3GHz processor just to look at a fucking map.
You shouldn't need a computer at all to look at a fucking map. Ironically, that doesn't compute for anyone under the age of 30.
Bah (and I'm long past 30).
Who wants to deal with paper maps? Certainly no one who travels very much. I remember the pre-mobile maps days quite well, and NO THANK YOU! What a pain in the ass. You either had to find a place to buy a real map every time you went somewhere, or try to make do with the crappy, detail-free maps provided by the car rental agency. Oh, and you had better not be traveling alone, because trying to navigate with a paper map while driving basically meant having to choose between dying or getting repeatedly lost and having to pull over and stop to examine the map and figure out where you went wrong.
Oh, and forget trying to navigate by paper map in a foreign country where you don't speak the language -- especially if they don't use a latin alphabet. Back in the day, it would never have occurred to me even to try to drive -- or use the mass transit system -- in any Asian country. Now, no problem.
And good luck trying to refold a blasted paper map. (Actually, I'm pretty good at it, but it's a rare and hard-won skill.)
Nope, I'll take mobile maps with offline download, automatic route calculation, incredibly-accurate travel time estimates, in my language, with excellent mass transit support (often with real-time arrival info) and voice prompts while driving every day of the week and twice on Sunday. Oh, and walking directions that don't tell you to walk where you shouldn't (though I'll grant that walking directions have only recently gotten good enough to be really useful in Google Maps).
And that's just for getting around. Those cruddy paper maps were almost, but not quite, utterly useless for finding restaurants, gas stations or anything else. Sometimes they had a marginally-useful gazetteer, but that was rare (and generally only included places who'd paid for the privilege of being listed -- hmm). And on the rare occasions where restaurant info was provided, the maps completely and totally failed to provide reviews on the food quality, timeliness and friendliness of the waitstaff, or even price range! Much less the full menu (that's hit or miss even today; but happens often enough that I usually skip any place that doesn't provide it.)
Paper. Maps. Suck.
Not because I don't know how to use them, but because they are severely feature-deficient. They only tell me a tiny fraction of what I want to know, and do it in an extremely inconvenient way.
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While I do agree with you, I will point out a benefit paper maps do offer.
Bloody good battery life.
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Big Maps Conspiracy.
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While I do agree with you, I will point out a benefit paper maps do offer.
Bloody good battery life.
If you're navigating in the back country, this is a good point. If you're in a car... do you seriously not carry a cable so you can plug your phone in? Cars provide all the power you could possibly need.
As a practical matter, my Pixel 3's battery never gets below about 25% full. It lasts all day and recharges very quickly so with just a few minutes' time plugged in I'm good for several more hours. It's really not a problem for me. YMMV, I suppose.
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On the other hand, that's a moderate disadvantage if there is construction work or a traffic jam or something else which makes your geographic knowledge unhelpful. The main benefit of an online map system is that it can route around bottlenecks as they happen.
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A paper map doesn't replace GPS. Nor is GPS required to use Google Maps. Electronic maps got popular way before most people had smartphones that would run them. That happened because paper maps suck, unless you're in a situation where one of their few advantages really shines. I say that as a trained celestial navigator with a (paper) chart collection.
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Even with Google taking most of the market there are multiple free-to-use maps available on the internet and on mobile devices.
I used one of them to circumnavigate the world. It had better offline support than Google Maps and the internet link wasn't so good in the Conflict Islands.
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Offline Support (Score:2)
I've tried using Google Maps as a Car Navigation tool and it works reasonably well but the biggest problem is that you need to be Online for it to work properly. If it worked almost as well offline, I'd pay for such a service. I know you download offline maps which is fine for in city use but they don't work too well when you go cross-country.
Sounds like a recipe for disaster. (Score:2, Informative)
OpenStreetMap's Android app works like a charm offline, is in F-Droid, and costs nothing.
I especially like its track recording feature with height map and everything. Plus favorites/notes with text/images/sound. And all are just simple files.
But the fact that every damn trash can (literally!) and footpath in our city and surrounding forests is in there is just damn amazing!
Why again would I use Google Maps?
Has it any features to offer that OSM hasn't?
Re:Sounds like a recipe for disaster. (Score:4, Interesting)
Let me pay for it (Score:3, Insightful)
If it must be monetized, I'd rather pay for it than have it direct my to a business that has paid to promote itself, if at the same time it does not show others.
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But then how do they get businesses to pay them for uselessly annoying both company's potential customers? "If all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail." All profits are advertising profits in Google land.
Wonder what would happen if someone tried to measure effectiveness of that money being spent? Of course to truly measure you'd need to factor in all the hate that forcing advertisements adds too, not just any additional sales.
I'll fully admit to being pissed at Waze for popping up ads
They all ready are monitizing maps (Score:2, Interesting)
Google has effectively killed off all of those applications that used their "free" map API. Just look at Geotracker, ExifTool GUI or presubscription Adobe Lightroom Maps. All of them are essentially dead since the projects are no longer being developed. There is a real cost to developing freely available programs now. FOSS software using Google's new API will now cost the developers money.
Start using Bing Maps - at least Microsoft is not charging for that service - yet.
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Never use any Google services, unless you are prototyping something that doesn't have a lifespan of more than a year. They deprecate APIs and whole services at random. I am shocked when I heard a friend say their start-up uses Go. Go! And tried to sell me how great it was. Which may be true, but it probably only has a year left. Hard to build on that rock-solid base..
Microsoft, whatever else they do, has a strategy of supporting things for years, with public EOLs and new iterations to migrate to. It'
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Never use any Google services, unless you are prototyping something that doesn't have a lifespan of more than a year. They deprecate APIs and whole services at random. I am shocked when I heard a friend say their start-up uses Go. Go! And tried to sell me how great it was. Which may be true, but it probably only has a year left.
Go is already nine years old. At what point does the one-year lifespan limit start?
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I didn't say one-year lifespan. I said one year left. Google products tend to have a 5-10 year lifespan.
Dart released in 2011, had the tooling ceased being maintained in 2015, and was removed from Chrome just recently.
Go was released in 2012, has several major changes being discussed, and is likely to fracture soon into Go 1 and Go 2 (ala Python 2 and Python 3). Google will no doubt continue to support exactly one of these
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>> Google services, have a lifespan of a year
>> Microsoft, has a strategy of supporting shit for years
Better rise fast and move on than languish in smelly shit.
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Not really. If I build a factory out of smelly shit, and it gets bulldozed, and I have to start again, I may end up with a better factory. But I didn't spend that time building a cool different factory. And I lost money while the factory didn't exist.
It may be better overall, but it's not better for my company
Open Street Map? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Sometimes I say the most under-monetized asset that I cover is Google Maps," Brian Nowak, an analyst at Morgan Stanley, said while interviewing Google's business chief Philipp Schindler at a recent conference...
Morgan Stanley, Brrrr.... just hearing those two words makes my skin crawl. People should consider replacing Google Maps with Open Street Map. I've been using mobile apps that use this mapping service for a few years now. It's every bit as good as Google Maps and the offline function is vastly superior to what you get with Google Maps app. Using Open Street Map also has the added benefit of starving the beast (a.k.a. Google).
It's sort of possible (Score:2)
See recent reports of people who have tried.
The report where hey used a VPN to shut off access to all 8 million Google servers was pretty illuminating...
But there are absolutely vectors you can use to fight back. As a base - sorry, do not use an Android phone. An iOS device means Google will not get any location data you do not feed it, and you can be careful.
For email you can use something like ProtonMail, and be secure... for search you can use duckduckgo or bing.
Once you start browsing the game is kind
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You cannot survive in today's technologically connected environment without google. Unless you are off the grid.
See recent reports of people who have tried.
I think you'll find one can.
Re:Open Street Map? (Score:4, Informative)
Can you recommend a privacy respecting implementation for Android? I think you're right, and it's a bit past time to be switching.
Nail in the coffin and all that jazz. I'm moving *everything* off Google gradually. We tried the experiment, and got fucked. I'd rather pay for services and have some leverage with misbehaving corporations.
Karta GPS and Maps.me are the most popular ones on iOS and Android. I've only used Maps.me but it did OK enough for my purposes. I picked it mainly because the offline option is really good and the offline feature on Google Maps sucked ass by comparison back then. Be prepared to download a couple of gigabytes of maps for the offline functionality so better do that on a Wifi. Maps.me is ad-supported, and it is Russian if that scares you, Karta GPS was developed by a Portuguese company (I think), not sure how they support themselves. You are never going to find a free app like this that does not finance themselves through either ads, selling your data or charging companies for overlaying their store/restaurant/garage/hotel locations onto the OpenStreetMap's map data. That being said, at least they are not Google and will probably not rape your privacy anything as outrageously as Google and Morgan Stanley will. There is a list of mobile Apps on the OpenStreetMap Wiki:
iOS apps: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org... [openstreetmap.org]
Android apps: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org... [openstreetmap.org]
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My beef with OSM is that is incomplete / outdated af. Specially in small, countryside towns.
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My beef with OSM is that is incomplete / outdated af. Specially in small, countryside towns.
Well, It's a crowd-sourced project, not a for-profit monstrosity. If you encounter inaccuracies, contribute corrections.
My phone runs Osmand~ from f-droid.org just fine (Score:2)
OSMand is vastly superior. (Score:1)
Sure, Mapillary is pretty new, if you need a StreetView feature.
Sure, free form search could use some fuzziness.
But in terms of details and functionality, OpenStreetmap is *insanely* ahead of Google Maps et al.
Full offline *everything* alone makes every service that does not offer that dead in the water.
Frankly, they do not even qualify anymore.
Not that you can't add/use online/satellite tiles anyway.
I have no idea why I ever would want to go back. Even as a Joe Noobpack.
To get spied on, crippled and feel b
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(There may be all sorts of commercialized or faked Osmand-derivatives on offer at the usual malware sites, such as the Google "Play Store". But there is no such thing in the open source version from https://f-droid.org/ [f-droid.org] )
Google maps and Dodge (Score:3)
I have a 2016 Dodge Durango. I love the car, and the nav. system works great as well. The maps in the nav. system are Google and the most recent upgrade is for retail purchase and they want 149.00 for the update which is ridiculous and I won't buy it, which means my nav. system will slowly lose usefulness. Granted I will probably trade in the car within 2 years as my warranty expires, but still it shows that Google isn't missing too many opportunities to monetize anything and everything. I used to use Gmail and many of their other services, but as the company went from 'do no evil' to 'make a buck' at any cost lower than a buck I moved over to other providers for everything including a search engine.
Alternatives (Score:4, Informative)
I've been trying to get rid of Google for years, but gmail and google maps (especially via Waze) are the most valuable things in Google's portfolio. Replacing Google search with Duck Duck Go was painless. But Google's map product is the best one on the market.
Alternatives:
Apple Maps -- not bad really, but the estimates are too conservative, and the routes aren't always optimal, and the traffic is often out of date
HERE Maps -- formerly Nokia HERE, these offer offline navigation. Traffic is optional.I am not sure if it does voice or not.
Are there others? I don't know. I use Waze mostly for the police identification (not that I even drive fast anymore, but I think it's fun to screw the opportunists trying to make money off people who just want to get home).
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Osmand. The version on https://f-droid.org/ [f-droid.org] not the Google Play Store version. Free to download forever, uses openstreetmap.org data.
i hope it's disabled when you're driving (Score:1)
I can only imagine your Phone/GPS telling you "There is an McDonald's in 1 mile on exit 54. The next McDonald's is 38 miles away on exit 92. Also there is a Burger King on exit 54. Next Burger King is 25 miles ahead. You can also get gas from Valero, BP, Mobile and Shell at exit 54. Buy the way, exit 54 was also your exit and you missed it. Recalculating....."
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I'm lovin' it....
OMG, I'm hungry! I could go for a nice juicy quarter pounder with cheese! And I bet the car is thirsty too, you should put in some high performance Shell V-Power gasoline, only the best! Oh, and you need new drapes right? Oh yeah, turn here.
Well then (Score:2)
Good thing I don't use their maps on my corporate issue phone and since my personal phone isn't "smart", they're out of luck there as well.
How horrible they won't be able to force feed me garbage.
Proximity-based real time bidding (Score:1)
Just wait til they get to the point where maps says "I can see you want to buy gizmo xyz. Here are bids for your business from nearby retailers."
You'd expect some of the further away retailers to bid cheaper prices to entice you.
I'm surprised they didn't do this years ago...