Anthony DiClemente, an analyst at Barclays Capital, says Siri can potentially hurt revenues generated by Google mobile search. The analyst takes note of Comscore’s report for December of last year, which says iOS owned 60% of mobile web traffic. A large percentage of this figure is likely coming from iOS devices such as the iPad 2 and iPhone 4 who search the web using Google.
When Siri was first featured on the iPhone 4S, users found themselves using the voice-activated personal assistant instead of Google. Since Siri gathers information from not just one source but many such as Google, Bing, and other services, using Google Search less affect the search giant. Since mobile accounts for 20% of paid search items and iOS items are likely to account for a bulk of the 20%, DiClemente claims customers shifting to Siri will hurt Google.
Although Siri could affect revenues generated by Google mobile search, these losses are still nothing compared to the revenues generated by Google search for PCs. Ben Schachter, an analyst at Macquarie, says that Google currently makes $1.3 billion from mobile search. However, it only earns $335 million after deducting traffic acquisition cost, which are mostly paid to the dominant platform iOS.
Given these figures, true, Google may lose some of its mobile search revenues to Siri, but since it pays Apple traffic acquisition costs, it might not be a huge loss like what DiClemente is claiming.
