dgstorm
Editor in Chief
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- Jul 27, 2011
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Obviously, bitter rivals can sometimes become strange bedfellows under the right circumstances. Google apparently paid through the nose to make the circumstances ripe for the strangest bedfellow team-up.
It's no secret that Google and Apple are bitter rivals, and it's also no secret that Apple agreed to use Google as the default search engine on iOS products because they were paid by Google. The amount of that payment was a secret, until now... Google apparently shelled out $1 Billion USD to Apple in order for them to use Google as the default search engine on iOS.
That doesn't seem too terrible when you consider how many users have iOS devices world-wide. We suspect Google made considerably more than $1 Billion from ad revenue by having the Google search engine as the default on iOS devices.
The reason we now know this info is because Oracle is still suing Google for an alleged patent infringement from many years ago. Oracle apparently disclosed some previously secret Google financial documents during the court proceedings.
As an interesting side-note, that is not the only thing we found out from the Google financial docs that Oracle disclosed. Google apparently made $31 Billion in revenue and $22 Billion in profit from Android since 2008. While at first glance, this seems like a large sum, it actually is a small pittance when you compare that to what Apple has made from iOS during that same timeframe.
By way of comparison, Apple generated $32 Billion in revenue from iOS in just their last financial quarter! That means that in only 3 months, Apple generated more revenue from iOS than Google has generated with Android in its entire existence since 2008! Yikes!
While the comparison is pretty awful, there is a silver lining for Google. They only paid $50 Million to acquire Android, so bringing in $22 Billion in profit was quite... profitable.
Source: Bloomberg
