Google is celebrating its 20th birthday and, gimmicks aside, it’s a good excuse to consider how staggeringly massive the company has become.
- Google has a whopping eight products with a billion users: search, of course, but also Gmail, Chrome, YouTube, Maps, Android, the Play Store, and, most recently, Drive, the file storage service it launched in 2012.
- Its YouTube video service reaches 90 percent of digital video viewers worldwide, excluding Chinese citizens, and 1.58 billion people watch videos on it at least once a month, according to eMarketer.
- Overall, Google will account for 37.1 percent of all U.S. digital advertising revenue this year, according to eMarketer
- Financially, parent company Alphabet is steadily approaching a $1 trillion market cap. Last year, it reeled in $110.9 billion in revenue, with 99 percent of that coming from Google, and 87 percent coming from ads specifically.
Some competitors have cried monopoly over the company’s tendency to feature its own services in search results, like job postings, business reviews, travel information, and shopping results. So far, it’s been slapped with two antitrust fees in the European Union, a $2.7 billion fine for its shopping results last year and $5 billion for competition abuses related to Android earlier this year.
