Posted on Friday, September 23 2005 @ 13:05 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
About 99 percent of Google's income comes from advertising and a huge chunk of it comes from AOL. It's estimated Google would lose as much as $380 million, or 25 percent of its profit, if AOL decides to drop Google's search engine. And this would likely happen if Microsoft partners up with Time Warner, in that case AOL would likely get search results from MSN and Google's stock price may drop severely.
However, the move by Microsoft could still potentially backfire, although with its cash mountain you would expect it to win the day. Google only chance is to paint a sufficiently rosy future picture to Time Warner’s management about what kind of outcome there would be for an AOL partnering Google, then perhaps a lot more than that $380m could be saved.Read on over at The Register.
For instance the new physical fiber network that Google is believed to be in the process of putting together, be used to transport more than just voice, advertising and wi-fi traffic. This could also become a conduit for video services, providing another route to market for the remainder of Time Warner’s content? Could the Google Video search capability index all of Time Warner’s precious content and give it another lease of life?