Comment by huggyface | Hacker News Reader

Comment by huggyface | Hacker News Reader

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No one has provided any evidence at all that the $544 million figure (itself essentially invented) is in any way a subset of the $2.5 billion "mobile run rate". From a purely rational perspective, there is no reasonable reason why Google needs to include in-game advertisements, or web ad revenue, in Android revenue.

Does Microsoft include Google search revenue in Windows revenue? Does a purchase of a hat in Team Fortress count as Windows revenue?

I suspect -- with no more evidence than anyone else -- that the $544 million is but the sum of partner payments for the Google applications or accelerated access, added with Google's cut of the Nexus line revenues. Advertising, though....Android itself has zero advertisements. I don't see ads in Google Maps, gmail, or in any system service or function.

I think what's salient is where that number is relative to Apple and Google's revenues per iOS device, which also don't include in-game advertisements or ad revenue.

Edit: Miscomprehended the derivation, see reply below

Those derived values are based upon the likely erroneous assumption that I just detailed. How does Google make any money on iOS devices if you excluded advertisements? Quite the opposite -- they pay Apple to be the default search engine.

I see the point you are trying to make now, but I'd like to offer two points about why this revenue derived from the lawsuit might include ad revenue estimates:

1) I would imagine that regardless of whether it is in Google's interest to count ad revenues in their public reports of profitability, it is most certainly their internal metric for profitability. They simply must have some metric for deciding if the Android investment is effort is worth pursuing, or if certain Android strategies can be considered successful. Would Rubin's declaration that Android is profitable be true if he were only counting early access fees, and Nexsus sales, etc? I don't have the numbers, but I would doubt it.

2) The 3 to 1 profitability of iOS against Android seems to make some sense if you consider that iOS, as of October, commanded over 3x the mobile traffic share of Android. (see http://bit.ly/tHlYe6 )

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