Google Profits From Search Dominance
by Editor, Web Wise Business (25 January 2010)
According to a recent comScore report on global search market growth in 2009, the total world-wide search market boasted more than 131 billion searches conducted by people aged 15 or older in December 2009, representing a 46% increase on the previous year.
“The global search market continues to grow at an extraordinary rate, with both highly developed and emerging markets contributing to the strong growth worldwide,” said Jack Flanagan, comScore executive vice president.
“Search is clearly becoming a more ubiquitous behavior among Internet users that drives navigation not only directly from search engines but also within sites and across networks. If you equate the advancement of search with the ability of humans to cultivate information, then the world is rapidly becoming a more knowledgeable ecosystem.”
Two thirds of this enormous number of searches, which equates to over 4 billion searches a day or 29 million per minute, were made on Google websites. Hardly surprising then that Google last week posted profits of £4.02 billion from 2009.
A 54% increase in profits, 2009 was clearly a good year for Google as it's non-search properties such as YouTube begun to deliver. According to results, YouTube grew 16% year on year in Q4 and generated £2.73bn of revenue.
CEO Eric Schmidt said, “Google had a strong fourth quarter, with 17% year-on-year revenue growth. Given that the global economy is still in the early days of recovery, this was an extraordinary end to the year.
“As we enter 2010, we remain hugely optimistic about the internet and are continuing to invest heavily in technological innovation for the benefit not only of our users and customers, but also the wider web,” he added.
In a conference call discussing the results, Google president for global sales operations and business development Nikesh Arora identified the search giant's long-form deals with Channel 4 and Five as prime examples of how the company is boosting its UK revenues.
Last week,
YouTube anounced the signing of its first live sports global broadcast deal, for the forthcoming Indian Premier League cricket championships. The internets leading video sharing platform also entered the movie rental market for independent films screening at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, indicating a possible intention for an additional source of revenue and competition to Apple's iTunes movie service.