Apple Wishes It Knew How To Quit Google's Money

How much would you pay to be the default search engine in the iOS mobile operating system?

According to a report at TechCrunch today, the magic figure that Google will be paying Apple for the privilege could be a whopping $1 billion dollars.

That's because Google and Apple, while enemies in the mobile arena, also need each other to survive. Apple's valuable iOS users - eyeballs that happen to be wealthier than most - are coveted by Google, and Google's massive search data is needed by Apple for those same users. (I'd also add they desperately need Google's mapping data, but that's not what this story's about, and that's just rubbing salt on the Apple Maps wound.)

Apparently, even as Google is trying to kick Apple's butt with Android, Apple gets 75 cents for every dollar Google makes on iOS from advertising and data collection. Which puts the iOS price tag somewhere around that billion-dollar mark, according to the Morgan Stanley report cited in the article.

A billion dollars in revenue is nothing to sneeze at, and on the surface it seems like Apple is being silly with this continued effort to separate itself from the ever-pervasive realm of Google's services.

What they may be thinking is simple math: if Apple can get $1 billion just as a cut of someone else's business, imagine what they could make if they had full control of that business? Thus, we have efforts like Apple Maps.

Clumsy as they might be, the fact that there's a lot of money to be made in the realm of mobile data and advertising means such efforts may ultimately be worth the birthing pains. With such a rich and loyal user base, Apple may be the eventual winner once it can remove Google and it's billion-dollar ad payouts as the middle man.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Source: http://readwrite.com/2013/02/12/apple-wishes-it-knew-how-to-quit-google

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