The Monetisation of the Map

For a company as wealthy as Google, it’s ironic that it seems to develop a host of features that make no money. I guess that’s what you do when dollar isn’t an issue.

Google Maps, the Ferrari or navigation, seem to be one of these luxury products Google develop. But don’t worry about Google’s P&L too much, developing the next generation of mapping has helped Google move to pastures even greener. Maps themselves make revenue, companies can pay for their logo to be placed on a map as opposed to just their name. Google also uses your location to serve you the most appropriate adds. Good for them as it makes it more obvious to the user they are there, good for the users because the logos help orientate themselves on the map. Winning.

What’s more though is that developing a great competency in mapping has benefited Google in unpredicted ways. With making Google Earth, Streetview and 3D graphics, a whole lot of capabilities were created. One of the guys working on this, John Hanke, was having enough of life at Google, over it, he wanted to start a gaming company. A problem Google has is retention of their more entrepreneurial employees, so they encouraged Hanke to form a start-up, but keep it within the Google nest. Doing that allowed Hanke access to the Google mapping capability which in turn lead to the games created being map based and this lead to their latest and more successful product being so awesome, Pokémon Go.

Even though Niantic, the company who developed Pokémon, left the Google cocoon before it launched (Pokémon is on IOS not just Google’s Android so would have been awkward), it is easy to see how within tech the opportunities of monetisation are endless and unknown at the outset. Does this mean you should leave a certain proportion of your business strategy to fate? Probs not…unless you Google apparently!