John Paczkowski

Recent Posts by John Paczkowski

Oracle Figures 700,000 Android Activations a Day Are Worth $3.65 Billion a Year to Google

Oracle has put a potential dollar value on the damages it may claim in its Java-related patent infringement case against Google over its Android operating system. And it’s a very large number.

Noting that some 700,000 Android devices are activated every day — each one built around Oracle’s copyrighted Java APIs — the company figures “each day’s worth of activations likely generates approximately $10 million in annual mobile advertising revenue for Google.”

So $3.65 billion — which is over $1 billion more than the $2.5 billion Google claimed Android was generating in ad revenues last October.

Why the discrepancy? That’s tough to say, as Oracle doesn’t explain the calculation used to arrive at that figure or the numbers it plugged into it, aside from the 700,000 Android activations per day metric that was provided by Android boss Andy Rubin last December. Over at FOSS Patents, Florian Mueller speculates that Oracle’s number is based on the assumption of annual advertising revenues of $14 per Android user, though again no rationale for it is offered.

In any event, $3.65 billion is a far cry from the up to $6.1 billion in damages Oracle has claimed Google could owe it for the alleged violations, though that first sum doesn’t reflect Android’s full value. Said Oracle, “This revenue does not even include all the other value Android generates for Google, ranging from Android Market revenue, to other Android-related services, to ensuring that Google will not be locked out of the mobile business, to lucrative relationships with manufacturers of myriad devices on which Android can and does run, to the inordinately valuable access Android provides to customers for its new social network service, Google+.”

UPDATE: Looks like that $2.5 billion run rate I mentioned earlier is not exclusive to Android. Rather, it includes all mobile revenues. So the discrepancy between Oracle’s number and revenue generated by Android is even larger than originally though.

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald