Making a Living Online
A panama hat maker in Bolivia is now selling in 84 markets and has grown to 50 employees across Latin America using AdWords. The owner of a baby products store in Nigeria had such a response to her AdWords campaign that she literally ran out of stock. A butcher in Warsaw using AdWords saw that at Easter, one of the busiest times of the year, the queue of people who came to pick up their online orders was longer than the queue of those shopping in the store. Displaced by Hurricane Katrina, the founder of a fitness bootcamp was able to completely rebuild, and then grow, his customer base with AdWords when he returned to New Orleans and started over. Using AdWords to find new customers in the wake of the recession, a son helped his father turn around his ailing home security business, now the largest in El Paso. The first Thai AdWords customer, a third-generation tailor, has grown his business from 5,000 customers in 2002 to over 400,000 internationally today. The technology revolution also has an economic impact: it is enabling more and more people globally to make a living for themselves entirely online. Worldwide, more than one million advertisers are now using AdWords—and it's transforming the fortunes of businesses at every scale. There are countless examples of entrepreneurs building and growing businesses with AdWords as their sole marketing vehicle, reaching new markets and finding new customers throughout the world with just a couple of clicks. Ads also enable publishers of all types to fund content creation and make that content available for free. The AdSense program now generates revenue for over two million publishers worldwide. In 2010, we gave back over $6 billion to our AdSense partners, who range from well-known newspapers to bloggers and niche websites. Communication for All Technology has also democratized communication and creation of information. Capabilities that were once available only to the largest corporations are now available to businesses, political movements, governments, and individuals alike. There is no longer a need to manage servers, updates, and patches; instead, users simply refresh their browser. In addition to Gmail, our most-used communications app, our broader suite of apps is now used by over three million businesses and 10 million students. Personal communications are increasingly complicated to manage, given the volume of email people receive. Launching Priority Inbox, which uses machine learning to rank and prioritize emails, we started to tackle this problem. We’re encouraged by indications that show its utility. Priority Inbox users spend 43 percent more time reading important mail compared to unimportant, and 15 percent less time reading email overall, compared to Gmail users who don’t use Priority Inbox. After a server crash took down its website, a city in Florida moved their site to Google Apps, which has given them more time to focus on open government initiatives like live-streaming city council meetings on YouTube. Insightly, a one-person software business in Perth, Australia, acquired more than 10,000 customers in its first seven months thanks to the Google Apps Marketplace. What’s Next? Larry and I have always shared a profound belief in the potential for technology to make the world a better place. It's why we've been prepared, from the get-go, to place big bets on new technologies—with the full knowledge that not all of these will always pay off. In the last year we have seen Google Wave fail, but our browser Chrome has succeeded beyond what we thought was possible. As always, we learn as much from our failures as our successes, and are constantly reminded that execution and delivery matter as much as great ideas. Chrome (Google’s web browser) was released two and a half years ago. Today, at version 10 Chrome is over six times faster than it was then and over 120 million people now use it. What’s more, it’s helping push browser standards forward everywhere. For the last decade, Eric has done an unbelievable job as CEO steering Google through rapid growth, while also managing two willful founders. Clever, strategic, wise... it’s hard to think of anyone on the planet who could have done a better job than Eric has, and we would both like to thank him from the bottom of our hearts. The good news is that as Larry takes over as Chief Executive (again!), Eric is still very much involved as Executive Chairman, and all three of us are just as excited about the next 10 years as we were about the last decade. The Internet, mobile phones, and other technologies are having profound effects on the spread of information and the lives of people worldwide. It’s a virtuous circle, with the information revolution directly accelerating the pace of technical development as inventors and entrepreneurs benefit from the increased demand for new products, the opening of new markets and dramatic gains in productivity. As a result, new technologies that emerge from research labs fall into the hands of users within a few years; new online offerings reach tens of millions of people in months; and startups spring up overnight. Decades ago, my father had to make a journey to Poland for the information that would shape my family’s life. Today, billions of people can make that journey online every day—and the world will never look the same. In the coming years, technology will evolve even more rapidly, and what is still science fiction today will have worldwide impact almost overnight. Larry Page Larry Page Sergey Brin Sergey Brin