Google makes $60 million a year because it indexes one website?
This is an absolutely bizarre calculation.
That’s not exactly how Jim Spanfeller sees it. The CEO of Forbes.com questioned in an opinion piece he wrote for the blog PaidContent.com, “is Google being disproportionally compensated for what is fundamentally other people’s work?” He said the answer appears to be yes. He claimed Google “makes roughly $60 million a year directing folks” to Forbes.com.
How would he even begin to know that? Let’s run a calculation. Based on estimates I’ve seen, approximately 1 out of every 100 Google searches will result in a person clicking on an ad. And though many Google advertisers only bid for a few cents a click for ads, let’s say that all the Google ads served up next to results prominently displaying Forbes.com went for a dollar a click. That would mean that in order for Google to make $60 million off Forbes.com, it would have to come up in the very top of search results 6 Billion times. And even then, there’s no evidence that that $60 million in revenue would go away if Forbes were to block Google and another site would just pop up to replace it for those search terms.
Maybe the problem with old media is a lack of facility with simple mathematics – they add two and two and somehow end up with 165.