[bzbarsky]

> 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...

> That's 3 times Mozilla's entire budget

Yep.

[espadrine]

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.

[0]: http://www.mediatransports.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Qu...

[1]: http://www.internetlivestats.com/google-search-statistics/

[2]: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2375420?hl=en

[3]: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2615875?hl=en

[4]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Sum...