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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

> $20B. It is hard to believe that this payment is just for being the default search engine.

Well ask yourself what the value of this placement is? Google earns about $200 per user, mostly in ad revenue. If Google search wasn't default, they'd probably lose half the users.

There are 1 billion iPhone users. At $200 each, Google stands to loose $200b. So a price tag of $20b to keep that...

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Are you sure that 200 usd is worldwide? Seems like US only

The number is higher in the US and lower in the rest of the world. But iPhones are more heavily skewed to US users. I picked $200 as a good ballpark.

True, and iPhones are also more common in wealthier people. Worked on a Project once where our target audience was medical doctors in Germany, and we had >50% iOS users on based our user-agent metrics.

Curious how you accurately got that figure knowing how draconic Germans are on protecting their privacy, I highly doubt they're cool with knowing that as doctors they're being tracked for some app targeting.

But yeah, anecdotally, just from visiting their practices, I also noticed most doctors in Austria tend to be in the Apple ecosystem for private use, but their practices and the clinics tend to be Windows.

Collecting the user agent string is one of the most basic forms of web analytics. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with "targeting" or violating privacy in any way, so it's strange that you brought it up in such a way.

At 10 cents per ad print, that’s only 2000 impressions, around 6 per day. Certainly sounds in the higher side of feasible. If the deal is for $20B, break even is a tenth that though, so there’s a lot of margin for error while still claiming enormous financial benefits.

> 10 cents per ad print

Source?

It's a number that I thought should be in about the right ballpark. The point wasn't to be on the mark, it was to be explicit enough about the estimate that would be easy for somebody to correct me if it was wrong. Which, it turns out, I was: looking around some more, it's closer to 1c per impression. That said, it's still easily in the ballpark of what would be a net positive.

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