(How) does Google Maps make money, or the Curious Case of Vanessa Mayer
This wasn’t really meant to be a post so much as a scratch document kept to get petty annoyances with an article out of my system, but it became a framing for talking about something that doesn’t seem like a wild take to me but has surprised most non-geo people when I’ve talked about this dissertation: Google Maps probably isn’t profitable. At best, I would believe it’s been marginally profitable in recent years.
(Googlers and former Googlers: you are welcome to contradict me with internal data about Google Geo’s financials! Go to town violating some NDAs for me please.)
But first: complaining about a paper.
It’s actually Vanesja but the j is silent
So in my efforts to situate my dissertation in some Dead White Guy’s theoretical framework, I found a 2012 paper riffing on Foucault’s concept of “governmentality” to analyze Google’s Place Pages platform. Place Pages was a project initiated around 2009 to make a little web page for every “place” on Google Maps, with a canonical URL and user contributions and everything. It feels very of the early Google mission era and very of the web (I mean, come on, canonical URLs). There’s still a Places API, but it replaces a Legacy one that was deprecated in 2024. The whole “Place Page” conceit has seemingly been abandoned, if all of the dead URLs on old blog posts about Place Pages are any indication. I’m not sure when it wound down entirely—a 2012 SEO blog mentions the transitioning of all Place Pages to Google+ (LOL), and in 2013 another SEO blog noted the disappearance of “Places” as an option in the general Search menu. (Side note: SEO blogs are really under-appreciated as the keepers of folk knowledge on “the algorithm” writ large and the state of platform interfaces.)
I probably would have skimmed and set this paper aside as fine but not exactly important to what I’m doing if not for a typo. The author at one point quotes a news article interview with a Google VP involved in the Place Pages scheme, referring to the speaker as “Vanessa Mayer.” I was pretty sure that the author meant Marissa Mayer, as she was the main person with that last name saying things on the record to the press about Google in that 2000s era. Sure enough, the citation attached to the quote is a 2010 TechCrunch article titled “Marissa Mayer’s next big thing: ‘Contextual discovery’ — Google results without search.” I can kind of see how someone might confuse the names “Vanessa” and “Marissa”, but not how they could do that when the name “Marissa” is in the headline of the article you’re citing.
I might have been able to let it go if not for the fact that the author calls her Vanessa Mayer twice? Also, assuming traditional peer review publishing processes_at least three people_ had to closely read this and someone else had to copy-edit it, and none of them caught it—which means that it’s possible that none of them even looked at the citation and none of them knew who Marissa Mayer was.
This isn’t a matter of defending Mayer’s good name—I don’t know her, I’ve heard plenty of negative things about her—or Google’s. Normal people do not need to know who Marissa Mayer is. But someone claiming to closely study Google in the 2000s actually kind of does. “Vanessa Mayer” isn’t the worst fuckup a scholar could make, but to me it’s emblematic of a tendency in certain strains of critical academic work to take corporate personhood way, way too seriously, ignoring the role of specific people in shoring up or shaping that corporation’s “personality” and/or decisions.
The dialectic of “a corporation is a (sociopathic) singular legal person governed mainly by its profit motive” and “a corporation is made up of a whole mess of people with whole personalities and egos and competing interests” admittedly can be tricky to balance. On the one hand, attributing a company’s bad behaviors solely to specific villainous CEOs or whatever ignores the network of other people and systems that enabled it, or presumes that a “good” CEO will somehow fix a fundamentally unsound business model or end sketchy (but legal) profit-generating activities. On the other, letting the corporate person be a monolithic main character can foster an illusion of internal competence and strategy that honestly, I sometimes fucking wish were the case. As my friend MR Sauter has previously put it, business history might be better served by a This Fucking Guy Theory of History than one of Great Men.
Google I think is an especially hard one for striking a balance between company-as-monolith and company-as-competing-fiefdoms because of the sheer scale of the company and its relative financial opacity. Even as a publicly traded company (or now, company within a publicly traded company), it is hard to get granular details of how the various divisions of Google contribute to the company’s revenue. In the absence of hard numbers, a lot of writing about Google Maps’ social or political significance assumes it must be making money, otherwise they wouldn’t keep doing it. However, this also assumes that Google is a rational actor (or a company full of rational actors) who would only maintain a service that could be rendered profitable.
Based on the anecdata of knowing Google alums: LOL, LMAO even. Honestly, based on just what having jobs is like this is a silly thing to believe! Another red flag of not knowing who Marissa Mayer is in 2012 is how she became the person who would be on conference stages talking about maps. Mayer became VP of Google Geo in 2010. Her placement in that role was widely interpreted in the business press and tech gossip mill as a demotion, since she had previously been in charge of Search—i.e., the big moneymaker for the company. How successful could Geo be if being in charge of it was a downward trajectory for a public face of the company?
There’s a few questions to work through here:
- How much money do Google’s geo products and services make?
- How much money do Google’s geo products and services cost? (i.e., does it make a profit)
- If Google Maps is not profitable, why does Alphabet continue to maintain and pour money into it?
What is actually known about Google Geo financials
Before we get into the (very few) numbers, some org chart context. Within Google, all things location-related were put under the umbrella of the Geo team in summer 2005 and as far as I can tell that team still exists. Geo’s products were Google Maps, Google Earth, and Google Local—a product for localized business search, initially released as a beta in 2004 before the company’s acquisitions of Where2 and Keyhole. This is apparently distinct from Google Shopping’s local search, which was first announced in 2005 (side note, I have no recollection of Google Shopping once being called “Froogle” but sure, 2005 was a weird year). The earliest article I could find for in-app ads for Maps is from 2006, and every now and then they’ll try new stuff (a recent-ish one you might know are “promoted pins”, custom logo map pins for brands). In those earlier years another source of revenue for the Geo team was paid purchases of Google Earth Pro, basically a souped-up version of the original Keyhole software, for $399 (there was also a “Google Earth Enterprise” product sold for $20,000).
So: in terms of numbers, there aren’t that many publicly out there and most of them are estimates.
Advertising revenue
A 2012 _Wall Street Journal_article on Apple’s efforts to build its own maps platform for iPhones offered this: “Mobile ads associated with maps or locations are estimated to account for about 25% of the roughly $2.5 billion spent on mobile ads in 2012, according to Opus Research, up from 10% in 2010.” This is a fancy way of saying the maps/locations mobile ads market was around $625 million. The same article estimates Google had 90% of that market, so for our back of the napkin numbers let’s say Google netted like $562 million from location/maps related mobile ads. This would still not be Google Geo’s full revenue but, sure.
There’s an oft-cited 2019 research note from a Morgan Stanley analyst that estimated that Maps revenue would be around $2.95 billion in 2019, and could reach $4.63 billion and $11 billion in 2023 based on new advertising programs for Maps that the company planned to grow out. I haven’t found the original research note anywhere online, just coverage of it. These estimates have been passed around enough online that today SEO-hungry slop blogs confidently state that in 2023 Maps made $11 billion. (I am not sure it’s worth it to reach out to Brian Nowack, the Morgan Stanley analyst responsible for the original research note, but he is just there on LinkedIn, IDK.)
I’ve seen one SEO blog claim that Google itself claimed Maps made $4.3 billion in revenue in 2023, but that doesn’t have a citation and I haven’t found anything else confirming that number.
API use and licensing
Google first introduced pricing on its geo APIs in 2011. It changed the pricing model pretty massively in 2018, raising costs for some users an estimated 1400%. In terms of how much money Google made from this change, unclear, but there’s a Reddit discussion from 2018 about how much it cost some API users.
In 2019, when Uber was preparing to go public its IPO filings disclosed that the company had paid Google $58 million between 2016 and 2018 for Maps API usage. That seems like not a lot of money all things considered, but this was right before the company massively upped the API pricing and also Alphabet had equity in Uber and I don’t know if there was some shares-for-API calls deal at play.
This is actually an area where I think the company has to have seen some successful revenue in part because of just how much effort other companies have put into getting off of Google Maps. Like sure, some of that’s companies that can afford vertical integration (cough cough, Apple) but the momentum toward alternative products and the shift of company investment into corporate map cartel (descriptive, non-derogatory) Overture Maps Foundation seems like something that was building for a while.
But, again: don’t really fucking know!
Google Earth (Engine)
Google Earth Pro and Enterprise were deprecated in 2015. I couldn’t find numbers for how many sales were made of either product. The closest to an alternative remote sensing product from Google Geo is Google Earth Engine, which is so fucking close to being decent remote sensing data analysis software if not for its kind of garbage IDE and APIs. Google Earth Engine has been folded into Google Cloud’s offerings, with pricing listed here. How much it’s made? Unclear.
Google Geo costs
Blog posts of former Google Geo people and my own informal conversations with former Geo people suggest that monetization has basically always been an issue for Maps and Geo more broadly. For me, this sort of clarifies the decision to sink a bunch of money into building their own basemap (instead of buying basemap data from TeleAtlas and Navteq)—if the product itself doesn’t make a lot of money, in the long term maintaining your own ground truth dataset probably is going to be more cost-effective. But man, that whole effort probably cost a lot. StreetView vehicle maintenance and upgrades, map data quality control, imagery licensing (contrary to assumptions by at least a few people I’ve had to correct, Google doesn’t own their own imagery satellites and anyway a lot of what you’re looking at is aerial, not from space)—it adds up.
So: what we know we don’t know
So based on what little is out there: at least someone in a fancy finance capacity thinks Google Maps might make tens of billions of dollars via advertising. Google made $264 billion in ad revenue in 2024. It is entirely possible 4% of that was from Google Maps.
It’s also totally possible that they make money (probably not in the hundreds of billions but maybe in the high hundred-millions or very low billions) off API requests, even if companies are trying to move away from it. The general neglect of Earth Engine makes me think maybe it’s used by some defense agencies so they kind of have to keep it running but it’s not bringing in billions of dollars.
So I can’t actually say with 100% certainty that Google’s geospatial services and products aren’t profitable. We just don’t have that data. We also don’t have data that it is profitable, though, and we do have anecdotal evidence that doing geospatial at Google scale is very, very expensive.
So even though there isn’t really a smoking gun here, I think it’s worth playing out what Google Geo being break-even or not-especially profitable means for both Google and for geospatial technology as a sector. Google Maps really warped public perception of the business of geospatial by making what had previously been consumer products totally free to consumers. Why do that—why undercut a revenue source—in order to maintain other revenue sources that aren’t necessarily profitable or certainly not hundreds of billions of dollars profitable?
If Google Geo isn’t wildly profitable why do they still keep it
1. Selling phones
Maps were and remain the killer app of smartphones. Imagine if you could buy a smartphone and you couldn’t install a mapping application on it. Pretty annoying! Even if Maps don’t make self-sustaining money, they were part of the suite of applications that made smartphones appealing to consumers, and Android (both as vehicle for advertising and through the Play Store) has been documented as pretty profitable for Google.
2. More data for better ads
This is the answer most people give when I post this question: Google Maps searches provide information about a consumer, creating richer data profiles that can be given increasingly personalized ads. I don’t think this is a great rationale—if we take the estimates around ad revenue from Maps seriously, we already know how valuable that data is and it doesn’t seem like it’s going to get more valuable. Also you don’t need to a map application open to collect location data about someone—passively collecting location is a thing a phone can just do in the background.
3. Goodwill
People do really love Google Maps. Hell, my spending this much time and energy thinking about this shit comes out of the fact that I love Google maps. For all the ways that Alphabet disappoints or frustrates consumers today, for all the shitty little monetizations that have crept up on us, Maps are still free and they’re mostly pretty good (anecdotally the routing can get weird, but also routing is insanely hard and even getting it pretty-good beats most other services). If Google decided to make Maps a subscription service for consumers I think people would still pay for it, but whatever remaining positive associations people had with the company would probably evaporate.
4. The long game/Waymo I guess?
I don’t think Waymo still utilizes data from Google Maps’ whole Ground Truth endeavor or Street View anymore, but autonomous vehicles were probably one of the justifications for the sunk cost (that, and wanting to get out from licensing from Tele Atlas). To me autonomous vehicles feel very much like a product of a This Fucking Guy or Some Fucking Guys of History—like someone or some group of people refuse to let this idea go and Google happens to be a place that can afford to do sunk costs towards some long game.
All this because of a typo?
I know, I’m not well. And I just gotta hope some of this can be salvaged for the dissertation because we’re pushing like 3000 words here, LOL.
Laying out the case against Google Maps as a highly profitable division isn’t really about making some big revelation—as stated already, I can’t actually claim any certainty here, and that’s part of the problem. I do think that understanding geospatial technologies as useful bot not profitable complicates academic narratives around the intentions of GIS/geospatial software companies by undermining a framing of these companies as rational, ruthless actors making hand over fist profits. There are far easier ways to make stupid money than geospatial.