Google has calculated its benefits for the economy

Google’s chief economist Hal Varian made an interesting presentation yesterday at the Web 2.0 Expo conference , in which he calculated the importance of Google for the US economy. It turned out in the region of $ 119 billion per year.

The value for advertisers is determined by the vx - c (x) model , where v = click value, x = number of clicks, c (x) = cost of clicks. Thus, Google brings about $ 54 billion a year to advertisers.

The second component of Google’s value is to save users time searching for information. As independent studies show , finding information in the library on a given topic takes an average of 22 minutes, while using Google, the same information was found on average in seven minutes. It turns out saving 15 minutes for each such "request".

Verian took into account in his calculations that the simpler the search query, the less time it saves the user, so the average savings for the user, according to his estimates, is 3.75 minutes per day. Given the average hourly wage in the United States ($ 22), it turns out that every citizen using Google saves $ 1.37 per day or about $ 500 per year, which gives the national economy a savings of $ 65 billion per year.

In total, $ 119 billion a year is obtained. According to Varian, this figure is probably lower than the real one, because the economic "value of getting answers to questions is very important."