Sometimes, it can be difficult to understand the value of something when there isn’t a price tag attached to it. Putting a dollar value on something – whether it be a suit, a building, a business, or a sports star – allows us to objectively compare it to something else, like a system of measurement.
This becomes especially valuable when it comes to business transactions. How much a business is willing to pay for a service or product gives great insight into how much they think it is worth. When huge businesses – with teams of people to do research, crunch numbers, and calculate, to a fine point, how valuable something is – spend gargantuan sums of money on something, it should be a sign that what they’re buying is a big deal.
It’s this idea that makes the recent deal between Apple and Google such big news.
Google Paid Apple $1billion to Be the Default Search Engine on the iPhone
This happened back in 2014, but is just coming to light now in the protracted litigation between Google and the software titan Oracle over alleged copyright infringement behind Google’s Android products.
The details of the deal between Google and Apple are fairly simple: Every time an iPhone or iPad user sees a Google advertisement through its AdWords program, Apple gets a cut of the profits. This cut might have given Apple no less than 34% of the proceeds from the advertisements, totaling a billion dollars in 2014 alone.
This can give you a sense of how important Google thinks it is to have its search engine be the default choice on your smartphone.
Google Saw the Rise of Mobile Search, and Cornered Apple’s Platform
For Google, sharing such a significant portion of their revenue with Apple just to be the default search engine on their devices is a sign of the times. 2014 also marked the year that more web searches were done on mobile devices than on desktops. Since then, mobile devices have overtaken desktops as the main source of internet searches, and this trend shows no sign of slowing down. As a company that makes 96% of its revenue from advertising, with 70% of that revenue coming from pay-per-click (PPC) ads, getting Google in front of as many mobile web users was an investment. That it’s a billion dollar a year investment only shows how big of a player Apple is in the mobile market, and how much Google wants to tag team with them.
Online Marketing for Your Law Firm
Seeing such huge corporations like Google and Apple in a massive revenue sharing deal over mobile web searches is even more evidence that mobile internet usage is here to stay. Is your law firm’s website optimized for mobile traffic, though? If you skip this crucial step, your online presence will be impacted, and you won’t be able to capitalize on all the potential web traffic, which can hurt your bottom line.