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Almost everyone knows the slogan “Follow the money”, made famous by the film All the President's men 1. In that case we were talking about political corruption, we try to apply the same principle for Big Tech. What is their main source of income? How do big companies make money?
By answering this question perhaps we can better understand their movements, their acquisitions and in general what their main interests are. We found this infographic created by Visual Capitalist really very interesting. The earnings of the major Big Tech companies including Facebook, Google and Amazon (by the way: but How much does Jeff Bezos earn?).
Amazon's earnings
In fact, some very curious things emerge. For example we discover that only the 50% of Amazon's earnings comes from online sales. The rest is a mix of advertising, Prime subscriptions and Amazon Web Services (professional cloud services). If you are interested in seeing Amazon's empire in more detail you can take a look at this wonderful infographic.
Another of the differences that immediately catches the eye is that between Alphabet (Google) and Apple. In fact, Google's earnings derive 70% from advertising on its platforms. Another 13.3% thanks to partner ads. For a total therefore of 83.3% of earnings with advertising.
Apple instead it earns only and exclusively through the sale of products and/or services.
How do big companies make money? The differences between Apple and Google
This, for many, is an important difference.
When considering the purchase of a new smartphone you are always undecided whether to choose Android or Apple. Although there is no way to control what is inside the products Apple, since they are all strictly a source closed, trust in it is generally greater than that of Google.
This because Apple should have decidedly less interest in profiling and/or following a person's interests without earning directly from this.
Google instead, given that it earns almost only thanks to advertising, it will certainly be more likely to want to profile and track the user.
These are obviously just conjectures. Apple however, they focus a lot on this aspect and according to their policy they do not collect any personal data from their apps 2. Those looking for a bit of privacy and have some money available will most likely choose Apple (what alternatives to Android?).
However, let us always remember that we are talking about closed source software and that unconditional trust in the Cupertino company is the basis of everything.
And Facebook?
However, the infographic does not end here and offers us other ideas.
For example, let's find out that Google in comparison to Facebook he is a beginner. In fact, Zuckerberg's company earns almost only ed exclusively thanks to advertisements. To be precise, the 98.5% of the earnings of Facebook derive from advertising. That's probably why he works so hard to collect data with his permanent presence in the apps and with targeted acquisitions.
Finally, it is also present in the infographic Microsoft.
Despite all the defects that can be recognized it must be admitted that Microsoft differentiates its income fairly well by earning only the 6.1% from advertising.
It is certainly no coincidence that Google, Facebook and Amazon are the main dispensers of tracers on the Web according to DuckDuckGo analysis Trackers.
Click on the image to see it full screen.
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