Skift Take
When you're Google, you can take more than a decade to hone a product such as Google Maps and attract more than a billion users without having to worry that it isn't making lots of money. But the monetization of Google Maps will soon start in earnest, and travel marketers, for the most part, will hustle to get in.
With more than a billion users, it's hard to think of Google Maps as a fledgling business, but it is, relatively speaking, in terms of its efforts to rake in big money.
That's all about to change, according to a research note from Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowack. Some of Google Maps' advertising products are expected to come out of beta in the fourth quarter and into 2020, leading Alphabet to grow its maps revenue 64 percent to $4.86 billion in 2020, Nowack projected.
New travel products, as well as augmented reality features and promoted pins that show the location of a business within Google Maps "are likely to further increase Google Maps' user utility and monetization potential," according to the research note.
And that's just the start. Morgan Stanley estimates that Google Maps revenue, both from desktop loc
