The Cambridge Analytica scandal has put tech companies front and centre. If the thinkpieces along the lines of “are the big tech companies good or bad for society” were coming out any faster, I might have to doubt even Google’s ability to make sense of them all.
This isn’t another one of those thinkpieces. Instead it’s an attempt at an analysis. I want to understand in monetary terms how much one tech company – Google – puts into or takes out of everyone’s pockets. This analysis is going to act as a template for some of the more detailed analyses of inequality I’d like to do later, so if you have a comment about methodology, I’m eager to hear it.
Here’s the basics: Google is a large technology company that primarily makes money off of ad revenues. Since Google is a publicly traded company, statistics are easy to come by. In 2016, Google brought in $89.5 billion in revenue and about 89% of that was from advertising. Advertising is further broken down between advertising on Google sites (e.g. Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, Google Maps, etc.) which account for 80% of advertising revenue and advertising on partner sites, which covers the remainder. The remaining 11% is made up of a variety of smaller projects – selling corporate licenses of its GSuite office software, the Google Play Store, the Google Cloud Computing Platform, and several smaller projects.
There are two ways that we can track how Google’s existence helps or hurts you financially. First, there’s the value of the software it provides. Google’s search has become so important to our daily life that we don’t even notice it anymore – it’s like breathing. Then there’s YouTube, which has more high-quality content than anyone could watch in a lifetime. There’s Google Docs, which are almost a full (free!) replacement for Microsoft Office. There’s Gmail, which is how basically everyone I know does their email. And there’s Android, currently the only viable alternative to iOS. If you had to pay for all of this stuff, how much would you be out?
Second, we can look at how its advertising arm has changed the prices of everything we buy. If Google’s advertising system has driven an increase in spending on advertising (perhaps by starting an arms race in advertising, or by arming marketing managers with graphs, charts and metrics that they can use to trigger increased spending), then we’re all ultimately paying for Google’s software with higher prices elsewhere (we could also be paying with worse products at the same prices, as advertising takes budget that would otherwise be used on quality). On the other hand, if more targeted advertising has led to less advertising overall, then everything will be slightly less expensive (or higher quality) than the counterfactual world in which more was spent on advertising.
Once we add this all up, we’ll have some sort of answer. We’ll know if Google has made us better off, made us poorer, or if it’s been neutral. This doesn’t speak to any social benefits that Google may provide (if they exist – and one should hope they do exist if Google isn’t helping us out financially).
To estimate the value of the software Google provides, we should compare it to the most popular paid alternatives – and look into the existence of any other good free alternatives. Because of this, we can’t really evaluate Search, but because of its existence, let’s agree to break any tie in favour of Google helping us.
On the other hand, Google docs is very easy to compare with other consumer alternatives. Microsoft Office Home Edition costs $109 yearly. Word Perfect (not that anyone uses it anymore) is $259.99 (all prices should be assumed to be in Canadian dollars unless otherwise noted).
Free alternatives exist in the form of OpenOffice and LibreOffice, but both tend to suffer from bugs. Last time I tried to make a presentation in OpenOffice I found it crashed approximately once per slide. I had a similar experience with LibreOffice. I once installed it for a friend who was looking to save money and promptly found myself fixing problems with it whenever I visited his house.
My crude estimate is that I’d expect to spend four hours troubleshooting either free alternative per year. Weighing this time at Ontario’s minimum wage of $14/hour and accepting that the only office suite that anyone under 70 ever actually buys is Microsoft’s offering and we see that Google saves you $109 per year compared to Microsoft and $56 each year compared to using free software.
With respect to email, there are numerous free alternatives to Gmail (like Microsoft’s Hotmail). In addition, many internet service providers bundle free email addresses in with their service. Taking all this into account, Gmail probably doesn’t provide much in the way of direct monetary value to consumers, compared to its competitors.
Google Maps is in a similar position. There are several alternatives that are also free, like Apple Maps, Waze (also owned by Google), Bing Maps, and even the Open Street Map project. Even if you believe that Google Maps provides more value than these alternatives, it’s hard to quantify it. What’s clear is that Google Maps isn’t so far ahead of the pack that there’s no point to using anything else. The prevalence of Google Maps might even be because of user laziness (or anticompetitive behaviour by Google). I’m not confident it’s better than everything else, because I’ve rarely used anything else.
Android is the last Google project worth analyzing and it’s an interesting one. On one hand, it looks like Apple phones tend to cost more than comparable Android phones. On the other hand, Apple is a luxury brand and it’s hard to tell how much of the added price you pay for an iPhone is attributable to that, to differing software, or to differing hardware. Comparing a few recent phones, there’s something like a $50-$200 gap between flagship Android phones and iPhones of the same generation. I’m going to assign a plausible sounding $20 cost saved per phone from using Android, then multiply this by the US Android market share (53%), to get $11 for the average consumer. The error bars are obviously rather large on this calculation.
(There may also be second order effects from increased competition here; the presence of Android could force Apple to develop more features or lower its prices slightly. This is very hard to calculate, so I’m not going to try to.)
When we add this up, we see that Google Docs save anyone who does word processing $50-$100 per year and Android saves the average phone buyer $11 approximately every two years. This means the average person probably sees some slight yearly financial benefit from Google, although I’m not sure the median person does. The median person and the average person do both get some benefit from Google Search, so there’s something in the plus column here, even if it’s hard to quantify.
Now, on to advertising.
I’ve managed to find an assortment of sources that give a view of total advertising spending in the United States over time, as well as changes in the GDP and inflation. I’ve compiled it all in a spreadsheet with the sources listed at the bottom. Don’t just take my word for it – you can see the data yourself. Overlapping this, I’ve found data for Google’s revenue during its meteoric rise – from $19 million in 2001 to $110 billion in 2017.
Google ad revenue represented 0.03% of US advertising spending in 2002. By 2012, a mere 10 years later, it was equivalent to 14.7% of the total. Over that same time, overall advertising spending increased from $237 billion in 2002 to $297 billion in 2012 (2012 is the last date I have data for total advertising spending). Note however that this isn’t a true comparison, because some Google revenue comes from outside of America. I wasn’t able to find revenue broken down in greater depth that this, so I’m using these numbers in an illustrative manner, not an exact manner.
So, does this mean that Google’s growth drove a growth in advertising spending? Probably not. As the economy is normally growing and changing, the absolute amount of advertising spending is less important than advertising spending compared to the rest of the economy. Here we actually see the opposite of what a naïve reading of the numbers would suggest. Advertising spending grew more slowly than economic growth from 2002 to 2012. In 2002, it was 2.3% of the US economy. By 2012, it was 1.9%.
This also isn’t evidence that Google (and other targeted advertising platforms have decreased spending on advertising). Historically, advertising has represented between 1.2% of US GDP (in 1944, with the Second World War dominating the economy) and 3.0% (in 1922, during the “roaring 20s”). Since 1972, the total has been more stable, varying between 1.7% and 2.5%. A Student’s T-test confirms (P-values around 0.35 for 1919-2002 vs. 2003-2012 and 1972-2002 vs. 2003-2012) that there’s no significant difference between post-Google levels of spending and historical levels.
Even if this was lower than historical bounds, it wouldn’t necessarily prove Google (and its ilk) are causing reduced ad spending. It could be that trends would have driven advertising spending even lower, absent Google’s rise. All we can for sure is that Google hasn’t caused an ahistorically large change in advertising rates. In fact, the only thing that is clear in the advertising trends is the peak in the early 1920s that has never been recaptured and a uniquely low dip in the 1940s that seems to have obviously been caused by World War II. For all that people talk about tech disrupting advertising and ad-supported businesses, these current changes are still less drastic than changes we’ve seen in the past.
The change in advertising spending during the years Google is growing could be driven by Google and similar advertising services. But it also could be normal year to year variation, driven by trends similar to what have driven it in the past. If I had a Ph. D. in advertising history, I might be able to tell you what those trends are, but from my present position, all I can say is that the current movement doesn’t seem that weird, from a historical perspective.
In summary, it looks like the expected value for the average person from Google products is close to $0, but leaning towards positive. It’s likely to be positive for you personally if you need a word processor or use Android phones, but the error bounds on advertising mean that it’s hard to tell. Furthermore, we can confidently say that the current disruption in the advertising space is probably less severe than the historical disruption to the field during World War II. There’s also a chance that more targeted advertising has led to less advertising spending (and this does feel more likely than it leading to more spending), but the historical variations in data are large enough that we can’t say for sure.