Win the Game of Googleopoly

Chapter 2Reality Check: Google Is a Monopoly

At this point you understand that visibility is key. If you are not visible, you are invisible and will not be able to sell your product or service or develop a fan base. Or it will be much more difficult. So the question becomes, “What is the best way to be visible?” I established that the answer is “the Internet.” The Internet is the most powerful form of marketing and advertising with the highest ROI. The next question is, “What is the most powerful form of Internet/digital marketing?” The answer is unequivocally “search engine domination,” specifically through the “oracle ” itself, Google. Of course there are other major players in the search engine space that exist, such as the following:

• Bing: 350 million unique monthly visitors as of 2014
• Yahoo!: 300 million unique monthly visitors as of 2014
• Ask: 245 million unique monthly visitors as of 2014
• AOL: 125 million unique monthly visitors as of 2014¹

While these statistics may be shocking, none of them comes close to Google. Google is the leviathan in the search space. Google receives over 1.1 billion unique visitors per month. There are 7.046 billion people on planet Earth and 1.1 billion of them uniquely search Google monthly. That is just about equal to all of the other major search engine providers combined! Comscore ranks the search engine market share as follows:

1. Google: 67.5 percent
2. Bing: 18.7 percent
3. Yahoo!: 10 percent
4. Ask: 2.5 percent
5. AOL: 1.3 percent²

To be crystal ...