How Big Is Google? Here’s Another Measure

[Mr.Sam]

Rory Cellan-Jones, a blogger for the BBC, calculates an interesting statistic from Google’s earnings release yesterday.
Google earned $803 million, about £407 million, in the United Kingdom in the first quarter. If you assume that rate won’t grow, that makes £1.6 billion for the year. And since Google’s British earnings are up 40 percent from a year ago, it is a safe bet it will grow.
That means Google will overtake the ITV television network as the biggest seller of advertising in Britain this year, Mr. Cellan-Jones figures. ITV sold about £1.5 billion of advertising last year.

Britain’s biggest commercial television business — the original “license to print money” — is about to be overtaken by an American upstart which only arrived in the UK in 2001.

That should be no surprise. As best as I can tell, Google sells more advertising than any company in the world. This year Morgan Stanley estimates Google’s total advertising revenue will be $21.9 billion. Excluding the payments it makes to companies that display its ads, Google’s total ad revenue will be $15.7 billion.
Time Warner, the largest media company in the world, earned $8.8 billion in advertising revenue last year. Viacom had $4.7 billion in ad revenue last year. I’m still working through the numbers at the other big conglomerates, but it seems clear that none of them sold more than $16 billion in advertising.
Google, as it made clear yesterday, is hardly slowing down. It stated a goal of becoming the largest seller of Internet display ads in the world (overtaking Yahoo). More significantly, it is devoting enormous effort to building a system for television ads that will rival its text ad system. For now, it is focusing on its YouTube unit. But it plans to extend these to other forms of video, delivered both over the Internet and by digital cable and satellite systems.
If Google succeeds — and that is hardly guaranteed — it could easily double in size or more, and thus dwarf any player in advertising.
We don’t know what effect this will have. Google will argue that it is making the world of marketing more efficient and thus better for everyone. Many in the media business are not so sure that this efficiency helps them.
But it is a good bet that the licenses to print money that have been relied on by companies like ITV around the world are increasingly being transferred to Mountain View.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...dfa&ei=5087%0A




Google is going to take over the world

[Supersam]

I use google for everything....

It was even on the new James Bond film. The intelligence guy just googled the name of the plane and found a wikipedia site on what it was

[Recursion]

Google are going to end up taking over the world imo

[Blob]

Google need their own brand of computers, that would be cool

[LOLROB]

Google are going to end up taking over the world imo

i have a funny feeling that will happen lol

[Recursion]

Google need their own brand of computers, that would be cool

Already making their own OS.

[Agnostic Bear]

Already making their own OS.

They made a port of ubuntu. Called "Goobuntu" >.>

[Shawnstra]

Interesting, when google closes, it is probably at the end of internet

[Recursion]

I shouldn't think Google will close any time soon,

[Jordy]

I shouldn't think Google will close any time soon,

I agree, but it makes you think. If a company can grow that big in such a short space of time, perhaps it can drop to nothing within a short space of time as well? - I guess internet adverts won't be going away any time soon so never mind ;P