1 BILLION dollars per year. That’s what it costs to own the most valuable real estate in the world.
So where is it? No, it’s not Shanghai, Paris, Dubai or even New York. In fact, the most valuable location in the world didn’t even exist until 9 years ago.
Drum roll please…. The search bar on iphone’s Safari app. It was just released through court documents that Google has been paying Apple $1B/yr to be the default search engine in their iOS Safari browser. Digital real estate, something that doesn’t even actually exist outside of the matrix, is more valuable than any place in the entire world, as of 2016 of course. But just how valuable is it?
Actual calculations may vary, however we took a screenshot of the search bar on the iPhone 6 and it measured out to be 390 pixels wide by 30 pixels tall. With the simple length x width formula to calculate area that turns out to be 11,700 pixels total, not counting the slightly rounded corners of course;
That breaks down to about:
Per year: $1B
Per month: $83M
Per day: $2.7M
Per hour: $114K
Per second: $32
Per 10th of a second $3.20
Or, if we wanted to break it down by area, then that is about $85k per year, per pixel, on the iphone 6.
Why is a search bar worth so much? In my opinion, because it is a window into our thoughts.
Happy searching 🙂