How Google will make money from Street View
The UK got its first look at ‘Street View‘ in Google Maps today. 
After various sightings of the Google car over the past few months, they have now launched the feature for a few major cities and the results are pretty breathtaking (take a look at Old Broadcasting House, where I work).
Like many people, I wasted a couple of hours looking around places I know spent some time researching the product. The detail and quality of the images is quite incredible (even if the face recognition software sometimes blurs out the wrong thing). Whilst oo-ing and ah-ing over it with some of my coworkers, we discussed what motivates Google to invest in products like this and how they plan to make any money out of the service (or any of its other free offerings).
Big Hairy Audacious Goal
Google’s Big Hairy Audacious Goal is to “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. A pretty ambitious task, but when you see results such as Street View it really hits home just how serious they are about this mission. (And look what happens to companies if their goal isn’t ambitious enough: Microsoft have pretty much succeeded in their goal of “A computer on every desk and in every home” and look how they’re floundering these days, with competitors beating them at every turn.)
But Google’s real goal, of course, is to make money. So how might they ‘monetize’ Street View?
They are positioning themselves as the place to go when searching for anything and the more often they get people visiting Google as their first choice search engine, the more revenue they will earn from advertising that is displayed alongside the regular results. Street View is incredibly useful – imagine being able to find out what your destination looks like before you visit somewhere for the first time – and I think Google are going to attract a lot of people to Street View.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we soon start to see advertisers being offered the opportunity to buy listings within Street View. Google already offer pay-per-click within Google Maps (they’re called local listings) and show up amongst the organic map results. I think we’ll see new opportunities for advertisers within Street View itself, which will be a more immersible experience than the standard page of search results (the so-called Ten Blue Links).
How about if you could ‘walk’ down a street and:
- check the menu of a restaurant, view the interior and reserve a table, all from within Street View
- view the special offers that a shop is running before you set off into town
- visit the cinema to see what films are showing today
- plan where you will pick up your coffee on the route from the station to your meeting
All of these businesses could embed content into the Street View such as photos, videos and discount coupons (user-created content is already appearing in Google Maps; select to view it in the ‘more’ menu).
Add user-generated content to Google Maps
How do you see Google making money out of Street View?