Despite being huge rivals since the launch of Android, Apple and Google continue to have an important relationship, which It is explained with the place that the search engine occupies in Safari, browser pre-installed on iOS and macOS, and in general throughout the system, with Siri searches included.
What explains that, being enemy companies, Google continues to be the default search engine for all Apple devices is the money. Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi recently estimated that Google will pay Apple $ 15 billion this year, and perhaps as much as $ 20 billion next year. Sacconaghi claims that these high figures They are due to ensuring that Microsoft does not end up paying more to make Bing the default search engine for the iPhone.
A long agreement that shows the importance of our data
These agreements between Apple and Google they are not recent at all. As The New York Times reported in this report, it all began in 2005 with the first versions of Safari for macOS. In 2010, the information that was available is that Google paid 100 million annually.
For 2016, we already counted that those of Mountain View paid those of Cupertino 1,000 million dollars to maintain their position in the search bar in 2014. And this same year, Benedict Evans, a well-known analyst, mentioned that Apple had entered hands from Google 10 billion dollars of “pure margin” in 2020. These figures have also been supported in important lawsuits.
The figure may be normal considering those that both companies usually handle, but putting it in perspective, it is huge. For example Evans mentioned that the App Store, one of its best businesses, made Apple enter 15,000 million dollars last year, only 5,000 more than Google. He also aimed to compare that figure to Netflix’s total business in the first pandemic year, $ 25 billion.
The agreement ranges from 100 million in 2010 to 15,000 million estimated for 2021
If now Sacconaghi speaks of approaching 20,000 million, the deal is pretty much the closest thing to a gold mine they can get in Cupertino. It should be remembered that between Google and Mozilla there is a similar agreement for the search engine to be the default in Firefox, but the estimated figures are 400-450 million dollars annually. That is, 33 times less than what is being said that Apple will receive in 2021.
The closest we’ve come to knowing why the numbers are so high was Oracle’s lawsuit against Google. One of Oracle’s attorneys indicated that Apple and Google had a share of 34/66% of the proceeds of the agreement for 2014, according to Bloomberg. The problem is that it was not explained who got each percentage and what was measured in income, and the figure disappeared from the trial papers at the request of Apple and Google. In any case, if it were approximate and maintained today, it would suppose that today the advertising performance that occurs in Apple devices is 15 times higher than in 2014.
‘Sgroogled.com’: When MICROSOFT Launched ANTI-GOOGLE Ads
The value of data
How much is your data worth? So much that Google is paying Apple $ 15 billion to be the default search engine in the iPhone and other Apple devices.
Google is paying $ 10 / year per device, to get you to use a ‘free’ search engine.
– @mikko (@mikko) August 26, 2021
Returning to the present, the estimate of 15,000 million was known, Mikko Hypponen, an expert in computer security at F-Secure, wondered how much our data was worth. “So much so that Google pays Apple 15,000 million to be the default search engine on the iPhone and other devices. Then he makes an account to know how much money is paid per user. $ 10 is your answer, rare though. Apple recently revealed that there were 1 billion iPhones in use, and 1.65 billion of the brand’s devices in total. The $ 10 per device bill comes out if you divide by 1.5 billion, but that’s not the point either.
The relevant thing is to see how much Google values securing the search, browsing, behavior and usage data of 1.65 billion devices, which helps incredibly improve your advertising business by the information provided to advertisers, as well as the performance that you get on iOS and macOS devices through the ads you show in the search engine and on the web. It is from this game that the bulk of Google’s income comes from.
If Google did not pay and was not the default search engine on the iPhone, which is also a very sold device in several of the most profitable advertising markets, the normal thing would be for the user to look for the option of trying to set their default search engine, as can now be done with alternatives like Yahoo, Bing, Ecosia, and DuckDuckGo. And it is necessary to remember that the most popular search in Bing, according to Ahrefs, is “Google”.
By paying these large amounts, Google ensures that it continues to earn what it earns, which could be less if another replaced it by default, even if it followed an adjustment to choose again as a search engine
Despite the fact that many users would choose you manually, Google pays those huge amounts of money to maintain the income it obtains directly from advertising and for the data that makes it improve, but also for ensuring that users do not have to dive between settings to choose it, for not disappearing as an option to choose from the list or perhaps for fear of elevating Bing, that if it were to be the default search engine between so many devices, it could experience a turning point.
If it has gone from 100 million in 2010 to 10,000 in 2020 and 15,000 in 2021, it is because a company like Google earns much more in several ways. Meanwhile, Apple, a champion of privacy and a rival to Facebook and Google in that regard, continues to accept that money despite the fact that due to public principles and financial position it does not need it. If we take the 10 billion Evans estimated and which are in line with what has been published in recent years, we find that Apple gets about a fifth of its growing service business from Google.