Google and its partners have been in a patent battle with just about every giant software company in the world, and its upcoming hearing with Oracle is just the next chapter.
In the Oracle case coming up, legal documents unveiled the ruler of search generated more than four times as much advertising revenue from all iProducts (including the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad) when compared to its own mobile operating system Android. The green robot only generated about $550 million of revenue between the years 2008 and 2011, according to The Guardian.
This staggering revelation is hard to believe, considering how Google just a month ago boasted that 850,000 new Android devices were being made active daily — a number that doesn’t include the Kindle Fire.
That said, The Guardians calculations were hard to argue or ignore, as the publication broke down CEO Larry Page’s earnings call last October, saying the company is “seeing a huge positive revenue impact from mobile, which has grown 2.5 times in the last 12 months to a run rate of over $2.5bn.” That’s much dough, but the suggestion that Android only generated a small amount of it is striking. Then again, as The Verge points out, this figure is derived from a lawsuit and Google may be under-reporting its revenue to avoid paying a big, fat fine.
Honestly, these findings might not be too far fetched. If these numbers do prove to be true, I think there’s much more to it than just Apple when it comes to the effect on ad revenue. Just think, maybe the community of users who root their phones might hurt those numbers a bit, because many of those folks put up ad blockers on free applications that run ads. I know this because I was one of those users ;-)
