Fighting off antitrust lawsuits is just another day at the office for Google. In fact, the tech giant was busy asking the Ninth Circuit to reverse an antitrust verdict against the Play Store and billing services on Android platforms just last week. However, sometimes it pays off to pay attention to these cases as we can occasionally get little nuggets of information that reveal facts about the business we didn’t know before. Such a detail just happened to be shared last week in a case brought by a rival video platform.
As reported by Courthouse News Service, Google was in federal court last Thursday fighting off antitrust claims from video platform Rumble. The lawyers for Rumble allege that Google is using its monopoly to promote YouTube videos over videos from similar sites. Rumble’s attorney, Jack Stern, told the court:
Once a YouTube video is placed above other platforms on the search results, a rival cannot hope to compete on another Android system’s home screen.
In response to the argument, Google claimed that Rumble was overstating how much influence Search has on YouTube viewership. Attorney John Schmidtlein, who represented Google, then shared this interesting statistic:
Roughly less than 1% of views on YouTube come from people who click on [search] links.
This may be the first time Google has revealed this statistic publicly. A majority of users tend to discover and view videos directly on YouTube, so it’s not surprising a smaller percentage of people look for videos by using Search. But what is surprising, if true, is that the percentage is that low.
The judge presiding over the case has yet to issue a ruling, but mentioned he would try to get one out as soon as possible. In the case the judge agrees with Rumble, a trial will be set for May.
