Is google maps profitable? It seems to be another thing done for the sake of maintaining a market dominance with no clear monetary justification or roadmap.
Its estimated revenue is $5 billion per year with plans for $11 billion in 4 years(from 2019). And based on the amount of ads I see there, it seems very believable.
Maps' ads are a little more pernicious than billboards. You'll note that Google doesn't display all the businesses that appear on a map every time, but if you pay up it will display your business, even make it prominent.
OSM shows all businesses (as far as their data goes) and that is the right way to go. There are ways of dealing with clutter. The fact that I can't find what I know is there on Google Maps (unless I do a text search for it) is infuriating and a deal breaker.
Lots of B2B and embedded use cases. Want to make a product showing driving times between destinations? Google Maps API, $$. Want to show how busy a restaurant is? Places API. Someone just did a bike route and you want to tell them the elevation gain they did? API call.
Google Maps and Places actually both have a ton of paid use cases, largely around being embedded in other apps. My defunct events startup made heavy use of both.
Something this article neglects to mention is that Google Maps has an inherit advantage by being baked into Android. Even if Maps isn't using any private APIs or has any special permissions, the sheer install base that they can use to collect data gives them a technological lead over anyone who isn't Apple (or one of the large Chinese phone manufacturers in any of the markets they have large market share in).
Traffic data? Aggregated from millions upon millions (billions) of Android users. Restaurant busyiness? Google knows how many of their users are at a location. For quite awhile (not sure if this is still the case) if you took a photo of a restaurant on your phone, Google would just outright ask you to upload it to Google maps. Yelp can't compete with that!
As an aside, these are also some of the reasons why Microsoft kept fighting for some smartphone market share. There are so many things you can only do if you are installed by default everywhere.
Google can go up to websites "You should enable Google accounts for login because literally 70% of smartphone users have a Google account".
Boom, overnight market share in a related market, analytics data flows in at a furious rate, ad revenue keeps going up.
"Let your customers pay with Google pay, double digit % of all smartphone users have it setup."
Anyone who isn't Amazon or Apple (maybe Paypal due to historical market share) can replicate that salespitch, and for whatever reason Amazon stopped focusing on Pay with Amazon (no idea why, awesome product).
A (completely tangential, barely related) thought -- it was at one point pretty well known that Apple's app store was quite a bit better than Google's, in terms of $/download. I wonder if a similar trend can be seen in maps.
