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Comment by AJ007 | Hacker News Reader

If Google penalized or delisted TripAdvisor, they would go out of business.

Is there any public data on how much of TripAdvisor's revenue comes from Google organic traffic or paid search traffic from AdWords? I'm guessing a considerable amount, but I try not to make assumptions about these things, particularly for large brands that likely get a significant amount of referral and direct traffic at this point in their maturity.

About zero revenues I'd say.

Travel companies pay Google for the ads. It's not unusual that the referral costs as much as the margin earned from the customer. Thus the sale can have a zero or even negative value for the travel company, it will only make money from that customer if he comes back later.

Your assumption was misplaced. The good question should be how much money does Google make from TripAdvisor? The answer is that they will lose a lot if they stop referring them.

If they are expecting to make a loss on the initial transaction, but make it up from LTV, I would be absolutely shocked as a marketer if they were not baking that into the equation when determining whether a given channel was profitable for them.

Of course they do check for profitability. There are quite a few interesting stories about that actually.

For instance, if a channel consumes the vast majority of the margin, that's still a valid channel. The advertiser could depend more on you than you depend on him.

Would be very hard for them to do that without inviting serious antitrust scrutiny.

How, though? It doesn’t seem like they compete with TripAdvisor. Their “Google Reviews” product isn’t in the same class at all.

Google Trips seems pretty close to me: https://get.google.com/trips/

And their standard search/mapping product returns lists of hotels/attractions on a map with star ratings, unique and syndicated reviews, photos, opening times and availability & price with booking link.

Google has the initial search traffic for hotels/planes/cars. They could capture most of it with the commissions instead of directing to the well known comparative sites.

It's a very hot topic between Google and the travel groups.

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