Search Marketing Blog
How Much Would You Pay to Use Google?
Posted by Sean McMahon on 10.29.2008Here’s an interesting tidbit that I pulled from an eMarketer article yesterday: A little more than half of U.S. Internet users said that they would be willing to pay $2.00 per month to use Google. Given that Nielson/NetRatings currently states that there are 220,141,969 Internet users in our country (or 72.5% of the population), this finding must certainly pique the interest of the G-Men/Women down in Mountain View!
The statement that 52% of Internet users would pay to use Google on a daily basis came from a September 2008 study conducted by Rubicon Consulting, as reported in this article titled ‘Fee vs. Free in Tough Times‘.
If you calculate 52% of the total number of Internet users in America, you have a group of slightly more than 110,000,000 individuals claiming they would pay $2.00 per month for Google’s search service. That would equate to almost $2.65 billion in annualized revenue for the world’s largest search company!
Now, $2.65 billion is only approximately 10% of Google’s current annual revenue. I doubt one-tenth of their current cash flow would be significant enough to disrupt their present business model. However, it is interesting to see what a mere $2.00 per user per month would mean to the company.
The other interesting statistic from this survey is the fact that, as shown in the eMarketer graph below, Internet users claim to value Google’s services more than twice as much as each of the other top-ten identified online services, including Yahoo! and YouTube.
Let me know if you would be willing to pay for daily access to Google. And, if so, what is the most you would be willing to pay per month?
