Chilling figure that Google transfers to Apple to be the default search engine in devices with the Apple
At least fifteen billion dollars that will pass from Mountain View to Cupertino so that Google remains the default search engine on iPhone, iPad, Mac and other Apple devices for another year. A frightening amount that nevertheless Google has agreed to pay into Apple's accounts, but that evidently the web giant is sure to recover.
How? Google lives of services and also of advertising, and just this last one represents a business of many zeros, as many as enough to justify, in fact, a 15 billion dollars outlay per year. A figure that has grown by 5 billion compared to 2020, a symptom of the fact that Apple enjoys enormous bargaining power against Google, and that the big G has an equally considerable economic return in being the default search engine among those offered by iOS, iPadOS and MacOS.
In 2022 it could be 20 billion
Apple devices allow you to change the search engine to be used for web searches: Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo and Ecosia are proposed. However, the default one is Google, not because Apple thinks it is better than the others, but simply because of the 15 billion dollars transfer.
A figure that, according to the well-informed, could even grow up to 20 billion dollars in 2022, an expense that would end up being doubled in two years (2020-2022). The whole story comes from Bernstein's analysts, who relied on Apple's public documents and on analysis of Google's traffic acquisition costs to come up with the figures of the "deal".
And one of the men who contributed to the discovery says that Google agrees to pour so much money into Apple's accounts to be as sure as possible that Microsoft won't outbid it and end up placing its Bing as default on Apple devices. But over the more than ten years that Google has been paying Apple for the "favor," other big names in online search like Yahoo have shown interest in being the default search engine on Safari, Apple's browser.
The deal may not last long
So interest in towering over Apple is high, and Google, for now, is paying. It is not so sure, however, that the company can shell out these figures for much longer, and not so much for a purely economic discourse because Google does not lack the possibilities and certainly recovers, with interest, the cost of the investment.
Rather because in the last times the giant of the online searches and its predominance, some would say monopoly, are under the magnifying glass of the US surveillance agencies, that moreover have already sued Google, last year, accusing it of conduct against the competition in the sectors of search and advertising.
The agencies in charge of keeping an eye on this kind of unfair commercial behaviors could have on their desk the figures that Google gives to Apple, and it is not sure that they could not introduce some norms to curb the phenomenon.