Mobile Marketing and Google

It is less certain that Google is the sole dominant player in the online advertising landscape. Companies such as Facebook, Amazon, Yelp are catching up fast with their own special weapons. Specialized search, which is invisible to Google, are taking an increasing part of the market share. This trend has becoming dangerous in some sense because the more specialized search would most definitely take over some of the search volume from Google. More importantly, these specialized searches are usually the most profitable searches where people are looking into one specifically category of products/ services. This trend is further catalyzed by the movement into mobile where a lot of searches are done in specialized apps. Android has been a great platform for Google to maintain its dominance in searches. Recently, WSJ recently commented:

Google is a big player in mobile through its Android mobile-operating system, which ran about 80% of the smartphones shipped in 2014, estimates Strategy Analytics. Its apps, including Google Maps, YouTube, and Gmail, are among the most popular for smartphones. When smartphone users do open a Web browser, Google is even more dominant than on personal computers, with an 84% share of U.S. searches in February, according to StatCounter. ComScore doesn’t release its mobile estimates.

The company’s tactics, particularly the agreements that Google signs with smartphone makers, have piqued the interest of antitrust regulators in Europe. Those deals have required device makers to install a range of Google’s less popular apps and to set some Google services like search as defaults in order to gain access to more popular apps like Google Maps and the Play Store digital bazaar, where users can download more than a million other apps and games.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/mobile-is-altering-the-landscape-where-google-operates-1427414659