Official Google India Blog

Evolving our business model to address developer needs

October 21, 2021

Digital subscriptions have become one of the fastest growing models for developers but we know that subscription businesses face specific challenges in customer acquisition and retention. We’ve worked with our partners in dating, fitness, education and other sectors to understand the nuances of their businesses. Our current service fee drops from 30% to 15% after 12 months of a recurring subscription. But we’ve heard that customer churn makes it challenging for subscription businesses to benefit from that reduced rate. So, we’re simplifying things to ensure they can.

To help support the specific needs of developers offering subscriptions, starting on January 1, 2022, we're decreasing the service fee for all subscriptions on Google Play from 30% to 15%, starting from day one.

For developers offering subscriptions, this means that first-year subscription fees will be cut in half. We’ve already gotten positive feedback from our developer partners on this change:

“Our partnership with Google has been a powerful one for our business, helping us to scale and ultimately playing a key role in advancing our mission to empower women globally. The pricing change they’ve announced will allow us to better invest in our products and further empower users to confidently connect online.”

– Whitney Wolfe Herd, Founder and CEO, Bumble Inc.

"Just as every person learns in different ways, every developer is different as well. We're excited to see Google continuing to collaborate with the ecosystem to find models that work for both the developer and platform. This reduction in subscription fees will help Duolingo accelerate our mission of universally available language learning."

- Luis von Ahn, Co-Founder and CEO of Duolingo.

Going further with cross platform experiences

While apps remain incredibly important for mobile phones, great services must now also span TVs, cars, watches, tablets and more. And we recognize that developers need to invest in building for those platforms now more than ever.

Earlier this year we launched the Play Media Experience program to encourage video, audio and book developers alike to help grow the Android platform by building amazing cross-device experiences. This helped developers invest in these multi-screen experiences with a service fee as low as 15%.

Today, we’re also making changes to the service fee in the Media Experience program, to better accommodate differences in these categories. Ebooks and on-demand music streaming services, where content costs account for the majority of sales, will now be eligible for a service fee as low as 10%. The new rates recognize industry economics of media content verticals and make Google Play work better for developers and the communities of artists, musicians and authors they represent. You can go here for more information.

We will continue to engage with developers to understand their challenges and opportunities — and how we can best support them in building sustainable businesses. It’s a theme that will be front and center at the Android Developer Summit on October 27-28, where you’ll hear more about our latest tools, application programming interfaces (APIs) and technologies designed to help developers be more productive and create better apps.

If you’re looking for more information about Google Play and its service fees, we've answered some common questions here.

Posted by Sameer Samat, Vice President, Product Management

When we started Android and Google Play more than a decade ago, we made a bet that a free and open mobile ecosystem could compete with the proprietary walled gardens that dominated the industry. It wasn’t yet clear what kinds of businesses would move to mobile or what apps would be successful. To keep things simple, we went with an easy-to-understand business model: The vast majority of developers could distribute their apps on Google Play for free (currently 97% do so at no charge). For the developers who offered a paid app or sold in-app digital goods (currently just 3% of developers), the flat service fee was 30%. This model helped apps to become one of the fastest-growing software segments. And instead of charging licensing fees for our OS, our service fee allowed us to continually invest in Android and Play while making them available for free to device makers all over the world.

The creativity and innovation from developers around the world spurred amazing new app experiences we could have never imagined when we first introduced Android. As the ecosystem evolved, a wider range of business models emerged to support these different types of apps. We've made important changes along the way, including moving beyond a “one size fits all” service fee model to ensure all types of businesses can be successful. Instead of a single service fee, we now have multiple programs designed to support and encourage our diverse app ecosystem.

The result is that 99% of developers qualify for a service fee of 15% or less. And after learning from and listening to developers across many industries and regions, including developers like Anghami, AWA, Bumble, Calm, Duolingo, KADOKAWA, KKBOX, PicsArt, and Smule, we're announcing additional changes to further support our ecosystem of partners and help them build sustainable businesses, and ensure Play continues to lead in the mobile app ecosystem.

Decreasing service fees on subscriptions to 15%

For developers offering subscriptions, this means that first-year subscription fees will be cut in half. We’ve already gotten positive feedback from our developer partners on this change:

– Whitney Wolfe Herd, Founder and CEO, Bumble Inc.

- Luis von Ahn, Co-Founder and CEO of Duolingo.

Going further with cross platform experiences

If you’re looking for more information about Google Play and its service fees, we've answered some common questions here.

Posted by Sameer Samat, Vice President, Product Management

Fostering an open and inclusive community with our creators

October 12, 2021

For millions of Indians, YouTube is woven into the fabric of everyday life, whether it is to laugh, learn, or be inspired by transformative stories. YouTube is a vibrant destination for people to find inspiring content fuelled by the extraordinary diversity that our creators represent across geographies, demographics, identities and cultures. This diversity is our superpower and we not only want to promote it but supercharge it.

As we continue to foster and grow our ecosystem, we remain cognizant of and committed to the responsibility that comes with being a platform that values openness. Our community guidelines offer guardrails for our creators for content on YouTube. And, we are extending our efforts with the launch of #CreateWithCare, our latest initiative in India that partners with leading creators to preserve and promote a diverse, inclusive community on YouTube that can drive responsible growth. #CreateWithCare aligns with our mission to empower creators from all backgrounds, communities, languages, and genders, including many that may be under-represented, to find their voice, an audience and cultivate a sense of belonging.

Technical Guruji, Kabita's Kitchen, Prajakta Koli, Madan Gowri, My Village Show, Bhadipa, Kushiyagi Ramya, Vishal Langthasa, Wonder Munna, Salu Kitchen among 30 leading creators across 8 languages to take the #CreateWithCare pledge

Today, at our Creator Camp event, a platform that serves as a learning forum for emerging creators to gain from the community of creators and YouTube product experts, we showcased the #CreateWithCare Pledge. The pledge unites popular creators from all corners of India in their endeavor to create content more thoughtfully by educating themselves about different cultures and histories, being respectful of diverse points of views and facilitating meaningful, open engagements among their communities. With #CreateWithCare, we want to help and inspire all our creators, even those who may just be starting their journey on YouTube, to approach content creation with a lens of responsibility.

Rekha Sharma, Chairperson, National Commission of Women in India, took to the stage to reiterate the transformative role technology plays in empowering women by enhancing access to learning and employment opportunities, extending her encouragement to our creator community to create content responsibly and inclusively. Creators also had the opportunity to learn from V R Ferose, founder of India Inclusion Foundation, as he enumerated a few ways in which creators could be more empathetic in representing persons with disabilities in their content.

Satya Raghavan, Director, YouTube Partnerships, Rekha Sharma, Chairperson, National Commission for Women, and V R Ferose, Founder - India Inclusion Foundation speak at Creator Camp

We are incredibly proud of our growing cohort of creators like Ranveer Allahbadia, who today has his own talent management and brand marketing agency, or My Village Show, whose unique take on village comedy birthed a whole new genre on YouTube, who have used their distinctive, authentic voices to build not only engaged communities but also successful business ventures. And, we will continue to safeguard our community of viewers and creators alike, by making everyone feel welcome and heard on our platform.

Our #CreateWithCare campaign will continue to bring together prolific creators to create useful resources and discuss how to be respectful of diversity as they create content that has the power to impact lives. Stay tuned to YouTube Creators India for more on #CreateWithCare.

Posted by Satya Raghavan, Director, YouTube Partnerships

Updating our ads and monetization policies on climate change

October 8, 2021

Working closely with outside experts, we regularly review and update our ads and monetization policies to help ensure a brand-safe environment for our advertising partners and to better protect users from unreliable claims, such as fake medical cures or anti-vaccine advocacy.

Addressing climate change denial

In recent years, we've heard directly from a growing number of our advertising and publisher partners who have expressed concerns about ads that run alongside or promote inaccurate claims about climate change. Advertisers simply don’t want their ads to appear next to this content. And publishers and creators don’t want ads promoting these claims to appear on their pages or videos.

That’s why today, we’re announcing a new monetization policy for Google advertisers, publishers and YouTube creators that will prohibit ads for, and monetization of, content that contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change. This includes content referring to climate change as a hoax or a scam, claims denying that long-term trends show the global climate is warming, and claims denying that greenhouse gas emissions or human activity contribute to climate change.

When evaluating content against this new policy, we’ll look carefully at the context in which claims are made, differentiating between content that states a false claim as fact, versus content that reports on or discusses that claim. We will also continue to allow ads and monetization on other climate-related topics, including public debates on climate policy, the varying impacts of climate change, new research and more.

In creating this policy and its parameters, we’ve consulted authoritative sources on the topic of climate science, including experts who have contributed to United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Reports. As is the case for many of our policies, we’ll use a combination of automated tools and human review to enforce this policy against violating publisher content, Google-served ads, and YouTube videos that are monetizing via YouTube’s Partner Program. We’ll begin enforcing this policy next month.

This new policy not only will help us strengthen the integrity of our advertising ecosystem, but also it aligns strongly with the work we’ve done as a company over the past two decades to promote sustainability and confront climate change head-on.

Posted by The Google Ads team

Making sign-in safer and more convenient

October 5, 2021

For most of us, passwords are the first line of defense for our digital lives. However, managing a set of strong passwords isn’t always convenient, which leads many people to look for shortcuts (i.e. dog’s name + birthday) or to neglect password best practices altogether, which opens them up to online risks. At Google, we protect our users with products that are secure by default – it’s how we keep more people safe online than anyone else in the world.

As we celebrate Cybersecurity Awareness Month, we’d like to share all the ways we are making your sign-in safer:

Making password sign-in seamless and safe

Everyday, Google checks the security of 1 billion passwords to protect your accounts from being hacked. Google’s Password Manager, built directly into Chrome, Android and the Google App, uses the latest security technology to keep your passwords safe across all the sites and apps you use. It makes it easier to create and use strong and unique passwords on all your devices, without the need to remember or repeat each one.

On iOS you can select Chrome to autofill saved passwords in other apps, too. That means your sign-in experience goes from remembering and typing in a password on each individual site to literally one tap. And soon, you will be able to take advantage of Chrome’s strong password generation feature for any iOS app, similar to how Autofill with Google works on Android today.

We're also rolling out a feature in the Google app that allows you to access all of the passwords you've saved in Google Password Manager right from the Google app menu. These enhancements are designed to make your password experience easier and safer—not just on Google, but across the web.

Getting people enrolled in 2SV

In addition to passwords, we know that having a second form of authentication dramatically decreases an attacker’s chance of gaining access to an account. For years, Google has been at the forefront of innovation in two-step verification (2SV), one of the most reliable ways to prevent unauthorized access to accounts and networks. 2SV is strongest when it combines both "something you know" (like a password) and "something you have" (like your phone or a security key).

2SV has been core to Google’s own security practices and today we make it seamless for our users with a Google prompt, which requires a simple tap on your mobile device to prove it’s really you trying to sign in. And because we know the best way to keep our users safe is to turn on our security protections by default, we have started to automatically configure our users’ accounts into a more secure state. By the end of 2021, we plan to auto-enroll an additional 150 million Google users in 2SV and require 2 million YouTube creators to turn it on.

We also recognize that today’s 2SV options aren’t suitable for everyone, so we are working on technologies that provide a convenient, secure authentication experience and reduce the reliance on passwords in the long-term. Right now we are auto-enrolling Google accounts that have the proper backup mechanisms in place to make a seamless transition to 2SV. To make sure your account has the right settings in place, take our quick Security Checkup.

Building security keys into devices

As part of our security work, we led the invention of security keys — another form of authentication that requires you to tap your key during suspicious sign-in attempts. We know security keys provide the highest degree of sign-in security possible, that’s why we've partnered with organizations to provide free security keys to over 10,000 high risk users this year.

To make security keys more accessible, we built the capability right into Android phones and our Google Smart Lock app on Apple devices. Today, over two billion devices around the world automatically support the strongest, most convenient 2SV technology available.

Additional sign-in enhancements

We recently launched One Tap and a new family of Identity APIs called Google Identity Services, which uses secure tokens, rather than passwords, to sign users into partner websites and apps, like Reddit and Pinterest. With the new Google Identity Services, we've combined Google's advanced security with easy sign in to deliver a convenient experience that also keeps users safe. These new services represent the future of authentication and protect against vulnerabilities like click-jacking, pixel tracking, and other web and app-based threats.

Ultimately, we want all of our users to have an easy, seamless sign-in experience that includes the best security protections across all of their devices and accounts. To learn more about all the ways we’re making every day safer with Google visit our Safety Center.

Posted by Guemmy Kim, Director, Account Security and Safety and AbdelKarim Mardini, Group Product Manager, Chrome

India Blog

Helping Indian startups drive global app innovations with MeitY Startup Hub

Badshah’s #JugnuChallenge kicks off today, only on YouTube Shorts

Evolving our business model to address developer needs

Going further with cross platform experiences

Fostering an open and inclusive community with our creators

Updating our ads and monetization policies on climate change

Making sign-in safer and more convenient

Labels

Archive

More Information

Subscribe via Email