Google's Secret billion dollar revenue stream.

Ever wonder how Ask Jeeves ACTUALLY makes money?   Well they do it via the massive adware/toolbar/mysearch install more commonly known as smileycentral.com.  If you read through this articleon ask jeeves acquisition of Myway, mysearch.com etc  you will see that it doubled their market reach in search and revenues.   This means ~30- 50% of Ask Jeeves current revenues are tied to adware/smilie/toolbar installs among other things.  

Its easy to detect if users have this installed as the user agent is changed to funwebproducts.   For plentyoffish visitors from the USA, there is a 13% chance that your computer is infected.  About a year ago smilecental  reached 11% of US traffic.

As you may guess installing toolbars on peoples machines by sneaking them in somehow is insanely profitable.   These companies are earning well over $20.00 per toolbar user per year. Google says they earn an average of $16.00 per user,  but a toolbar users tends to be double the average as they are regular users not casual users.  

Toolbars are the major battlefield that NO one wants to talk about.  Everything being done today by Microsoft, Yahoo and Google is to get their toolbars on peoples machines.  Google did a deal with Sun, Dell and firefox to push their toolbars.   From the above news release  I suspect Ask.com is currently getting ~30-50% of its revenues from its toolbars, Microsoft, Yahoo and Google are probably at 20%+ of revenues.   

The longer Microsoft delays windows vista the larger Googles toolbar install base becomes and the more google is dependent on toolbar revenues.    When windows vista launches googles toolbar install base will vanish somewhat and with it a large part of its revenues. 

The real question is when is Myspace going to stop screwing around and create custom toolbars for its users?   Considering that myspace was born in the “dark side” of the web, it should be a no brainer for them?