365 days a year for several years Google has had a Chrome banner ad on www.google.com showing to Firefox users. That page is the most lucrative property on the web in terms of eyeballs, so take your most outrageous ad rate you can find and do the math. It's billions per year worth of advertising.
Yes but that doesn't mean the economic value is non-existent.
Theoretically Google could sell that space. They trade this potential profit to promote their own product, at a loss, of how ever much that space could be sold for. This is like economics 202, opportunity cost.
It's not that simple. It's easy enough to claim that showing a Chrome ad benefits users and helps Google's brand. Showing third party ads hurts Google's brand and overall value.
Only if the 3rd party project is subpar. largely chrome is a 3rd party project from the eyes of search. I'm pretty sure there isn't a massive overlap between search and chrome developers at google.
> I'd like to see a source for the billion-dollar-a-year campaign
I can't find a source for the figure right now, unfortunately. And the whole thing is a guess, since Google doesn't release this information. All it releases is overall sales/marketing spending, which in 2012 was about $6 billion if I understand right (see <http://www.quora.com/How-much-does-Google-spend-on-advertisi...). That includes salaries for the marketing folks, etc, not just direct spending on campaigns.
As I recall, the $1b estimate broke down something like 30% actual spend (primetime TV ads, ads all over the London Tube, etc, etc) and 70% in-kind placement (i.e. "every search you do on Google with another browser shoves an ad for Chrome in your face"). I'll see if I can hunt down where I saw that...
I recall seeing a heavy metro ad campaign in Paris. All the slots were used. The campaign cost listed[0] (Q-Massifs) doesn't even have a regular price. Extrapolating from the regular campaigns, it cost Google beyond a million euros a week, and the campaign lasted more than that, if I recall correctly. And that is just one city, one campaign.
As for Google Search ads, let's take the number of search requests[1], an example CPC they give[2], an example CTR they give[3], the StatCounter portion of non-Chrome users[4], we get 1216373500000 * (1-0.3) * $0.10 * 0.005.
That's $425,730,725 for a one-year campaign in 2012. Given the prominence of this ad (and its unintentional scare value), the CTR is probably off, so that's a very conservative figure.
If that is indeed 70% of the whole campaign cost, the total is $608,186,750 per year.
The "billion dollar" number is speculation, since the Google front page ad space that Chrome got isn't for sale to anyone else. "Priceless" would possibly be more accurate.
