Google Q2 Earnings Call: Android Search Up 300% in 1H

Thu, 07/15/2010 – 22:39 byGoogle released its second quarter 2010 earnings today. You can read the full release and see the earnings slides here. I’m going to focus only on the mobile comments made during the earnings call. All of the remarks below are from Google SVP Jonathan Rosenberg: On Android growth: 
  • We are now activating over 160,000 Android devices every day. This is up from 65,000 last quarter.
  • The Android market is also open of course, and now has over 70,000 apps. That was around 30,000 in April.
On mobile search growth:
  • Android search grew 300% in the first half of 2010. So, yes, search on Android devices is exploding.
  • The most popular app is a browser. And what do people do with the browser on these devices? They search an order of magnitude more than they have on any previous type of smartphones, which they had in years past. So, the combination of people browsing on these smartphones connected on very, very fast networks, and searching on them is basically the formula around how Google makes, how Google succeeds.
On click to call ad performance:
  • The click to call ads on the high end mobile phones are doing very well. The click through rates go up 6% when you put ads with a phone number, 8% when you put a local address.
On mobile search not cannibalizing the PC:
  • I think there are also slightly different usage patterns across desktop and mobile. You tend to see more use of the mobile devices on weekends, which is not surprising but they don’t actually have any more specific data that proves those observations or that hypothesis.
While mobile search volumes are growing from a small base, the numbers very quickly can become very large. Citi’s Mark Mahaney estimated that mobile search volumes are now roughly 10% of Google’s overall monthly search queries in the US. That may be aggressive but if it’s close that would mean more than a billion searches a month on mobile devices. And if we consider that the bulk of those are coming from smartphones (21% – 23% of the market), the growth potential is huge.