Google Decides to Monetize Maps
Oh, what a surprise, not.<p>It is pretty hard not to see this coming with Google&#x27;s falling margins on search advertising. Let&#x27;s review how things have gone for Google over the last 10 years.<p>2009 the big mortgage recession hits and Google, like everyone else, sees businesses suddenly cut back on what they are willing to spend on internet advertising. As Google&#x27;s CPC metric begins to free fall after years of growing or holding steady, Google sees the core metric of the only business they have that makes money at the margins they need to exist, well its dying.<p>In response they start by buying more traffic. This means they start paying third parties to send traffic that includes a search to Google so that Google can put ads on it. Sometimes that means paying a browser company to send search your way, sometimes it means paying a competitor with a smart phone offering to send the search traffic it generates to Google rather than an upstart.  Importantly, that upstart (Bing) is reporting <i>increases</i> in their CPC as more advertisers start seeing them as a credible alternative to the big G. Bing is also buying traffic from EVERYONE and kind of &quot;psuedo&quot; buying it by offering access to their search for free through the old Yahoo! BOSS API.<p>This works for a short period of time, but not for very long so the next thing Google does is to reduce what they paid &quot;other sites&quot; for using their Advertising engine. That let them put more of the money on their own bottom line. This was collectively experienced by millions of web sites that found their AdSense for content ads went from paying $1K a month to paying $100 a month. It was exacerbated by the falling CPC as well. Spammy ad sites proliferated at people who used to make good money with these Ads were desperate to hold onto that revenue stream.<p>This fix was limited though because, well you can&#x27;t save yourself out of bankruptcy. You have to grow the top line to keep ahead. So Google began a campaign of adding more and more advertising (some overt, some not so much) to all of their own properties (reported as Google Sites in their earnings). More and more search results were actually ads rather than organic results. And for things that indicated a &quot;commercial intent&quot;, ie that the data cow on the other end was looking to spend money, well those queries result in a veritable cornucopia of paid spots, with payments to be in the &#x27;shopping windows&#x27; or payments to be on the page, or payments to be higher in the results. White or black hat SEO be damned, there just isn&#x27;t room on a search result page with commercial intent for an organic result.<p>Meanwhile Google, now as Alphabet, was pouring cash into bet after bet, and unwilling (or unable) to find a way to nurture even modest successes began a series of project that consumed cash, never were profitable, and then were killed. And things which one might expect to be profitable like a worlds largest video service, or &quot;Google class&quot; cloud computation, struggled. Service after service foundered on a fundamental challenges like having a human being the paying customer could call to get answers to problems. Combining that legendary non-customer service with the propensity to yank services has put tremendous headwinds on any Google offering that asks its customer to rely on it for anything other than a peripheral capability.<p>Year after year, as the money from ads was harder and harder to get, they have stayed ahead of that decline by killing projects, reducing the amount of money they share with the people who create the content, and trimming back on the &quot;perqs&quot; they used to so freely lavish on their employees.<p>They can&#x27;t get robots right, they haven&#x27;t been able to get self driving cars right, they can&#x27;t make money with services when their customer service is non-existent, they haven&#x27;t been able to make money with videos, or books, or much of any other of the worlds information. There are really only two things that people consider &quot;indispensable&quot; and even those are becoming less so, their search engine and their maps.<p>One makes (to a reasonable approximation) all of the money, and one just costs money. So yeah, they are now stuck trying to squeeze money out of maps because they  can&#x27;t improve the core value of advertising with them. Especially not with all the new restrictions on selling the data cows data milk to third parties.<p>What I find most interesting is that Google has <i>decimated</i> Garmin&#x27;s market. Garmin would make anywhere from $30 to $75 per sale on their &quot;navigator&quot; products, which people used for their turn by turn directions and ready maps. Google gave away their maps for free on phones that Google made little money on. That used to be okay, but now it appears that trying to get some revenue out of this product is the only way to avoid the dreaded &quot;year of year decline&quot; in top line revenue. That has so many ill effects from taking the stock price down to creating a competitive opening.<p>Apple is uniquely positioned here, they have maps and they have devices to show them. Sort of the 21st century version of Garmin where their maps are just a feature of a bigger device.  If Apple invested in a privacy first search engine with organic results and limited their advertising aspirations to a modest net income for the group I think they would seriously wound Google.<p>Interesting times ahead.