Heads In Beds Show - Revisiting Google Vacation Rentals For 2025 - How Is This Going For Google?

Episode Date: January 1, 2025

In this episode Paul and Conrad revisit how things are going with Google's Vacation Rentals search platform in Google Travel. Is the 800lb advertising gorilla taking tons of Vacation Rental marketshare? Or an almost-dead-fish flopping on the deck? Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101Google Vacation Rentals HelpKilled By Google ProjectExample Google.com Travel SERPExample Google Vacation Rentals listing🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteFacebook PageInstagram🚀 About BuildUp BookingsBuildUp Bookings is a team of creative, problem solvers made to drive you more traffic, direct bookings and results for your accommodations brand. Reach out to us for help on search, social and email marketing for your vacation rental brand.

Welcome to the Head to Med Show presented by Buildup Bookings. We teach you how to get more vacation properties, earn more revenue per property, master marketing, and increase your occupancy. Take your vacation rental marketing game to the next level by listening in. I'm your co-host, Conrad. I'm your co-host, Paul. All right, Paul, how's it going? What's going on? Well, you were one of the lucky ones who got to see me walking back from school this morning.

We thought we might be having a green Christmas this year, and that still might be the case. It's the lovely part about Minnesota. Wait 15 minutes, it might be not so crazy. But yes, you got to see trudging through six inches of snow, six year old. Oh, boy, it was a it was a valiant effort this morning. I will admit there were there's a minute of piggyback ride in there a couple minutes piggyback ride just so that we got there on time. But I felt a little bit like a sled dog. But yeah, it's we're in the holiday season now.

Officially, how are you doing, sir? I will say if I could, if it's not my fingers and be in the snow one time, and I pretty much would enjoy one time of the year, would be Christmas. That would be the time I would choose to have the snow around and be in a cold environment. The other three hundred and let's say 60 days per year, I'm perfectly fine avoiding the snow and avoiding the cold. Days around Christmas, it's good. So I actually hope, hopefully, hopefully it'll stick around for Christmas and then your boys will get that experience. Yeah. Exactly. Well, that's the fingers crossed moment here. So well, that's the looking at the bright

side, looking at the glass half empty is yeah, it's not fun shoveling this morning and I don't think it'll be fun shoveling this afternoon because that's what you have to do when you keep getting snow so yeah okay are you a snowblower kind of guy do you have the right equipment for this type of stuff or you have to go pretty manual I do um I when I and this was the other fun part about the morning as I was pull starting and pull starting and pull starting. Oh, she didn't turn over. So, so we're still shoveling. The snow blower I'm hoping is just a needs to warm up or something like that. This is it does usually start hard to start the winter here. And I probably could have, you know, checked early, but that's not how we do it. So so yeah, so now it's it was it was I think, hour and a half of shoveling this morning.

And if I get out with another hour today, that's so be it. That's not the worst thing in the world. And again, hopefully fingers crossed that a snowblower turns over at some point, and we don't have to worry nearly as much about. Yeah, you got the right equipment. You know, speaking of cold starts, I wonder if we can transition that nicely into Google Vacation Rentals because that is something that maybe has had a little bit of a cold start. This was an episode idea we came up with a few weeks ago, maybe at this point. I thought it was a good one because is there anything that's gotten more awareness amongst professional property managers and vacation rental managers than Google Vacation Rentals

that is delivered so poorly? I would argue the only rival that comes to mind is Marriott Homes and Villas, which many clients are very excited to get in and then will often notate to me or let me know down the road that they get no meaningful bookings from Marriott Homes and Villas. No shade being thrown there, right?

That's just facts from whatever. So maybe I thought the same thing would apply to Google vacation rental. So we thought today would be a fun update. Where do we stand? You know, we were here. This is 2025 now, if you're listening. It's probably turned over into the new year.

Hope you had an awesome Christmas, New Year's, all that kind of stuff. But yeah, it's now been pretty much five years since Google Vacation Rental's launched. I mean, technically, I guess it was more towards the tail end of 2019. So technically we could argue maybe the end of 2025 would be a more apt sort of five year comparison.

But it's been some time, 2019 it launched. 2021 they started showing a little bit more broadly. 2023 five year comparison. But it's been some time, 2019 it launched, 2021 they started showing a little bit more broadly, 2023 they added schema.org markup. Again, we're recording this to tail end of 24, you're listening beginning of 25. And yeah, where do we stand on this thing? So what's kind of your read of Google vacation?

What's given me your kind of like high level summary over the last few years, and I'm happy to give some extra notes as well. Yeah, firstly, honestly, it was surprising to realize that 2019 is how far back we went, mostly because it just doesn't feel like there has been a lot of movement. It has felt like a cold start. It has felt stagnant or that things haven't progressed as quickly as it is. We have the clearest comparison of an Airbnb. I mean, look at what Airbnb has done since the end of 2019 to 2024, 2025.

Now look what Google Vacation Rentals has done over that same period. Yes, I will certainly admit that Google has some other focuses that they're working on, whatever that is. But what I keep coming back to is that they keep hyping this up. I mean, if you were listening in on the Google Marketing Live stuff, one of the first things they referenced really is they were talking about some of the AI, talking about, I think they were still talking about Gemini at that point, but they were referencing things that would clearly kind of fold into the travel experience and really kind of how that machine learning and how that AI can build into that. And we've just seen so little follow through, so little delivery.

I mean, if you're not using some of these integration providers, you're probably not even using Google Vacation Rentals. And we have, we've talked about it that there are some nice things. We talked about the schema markup. There seems to be some clear power there, but you also have to do a lot more of the work behind the scenes. So I don't know. I don't know if the whole Google travel ecosystem is still more built out for hotels. I mean, it clearly is because that meta search is a little more established and then we can go down. That's a whole other episode discussion there, but it has fallen flat on the hope that a lot of us as SEO people, as marketers, as people who understand how the power of Google, it just hasn't delivered there.

So I mean, certainly fill in any notes there, but yeah, it's lackluster. It could be so much more. We've got some examples even here from how Gemini is trying to help plan the trip planning process and it's not. It just defaults so heavily back to hotels because that's where Google has all the inventory. So we can beat that a little bit here. But you have more people who are actually trying to tap into this and your individual clients have certainly tried to get more value out of this.

Where have you seen, have you seen any successes? I mean, it is, I don't want to be all fail, fail, fail, but have you seen any success coming through? I think the best example I could point to is a modest success, a modest amount of reach. That's the best I could do, basically. I think we maybe have a few clients who are integrated through their PMS provider. I think OwnerRes is the one that we seem to have the most positive feedback towards. Like, hey, owner has got our integration with Google Vacation Rentals Live, it's working, and we're getting some level of bookings from Google Vacation Rental specifically through the owner as integration. So that's one I could point to. But I can't think of anybody who said it's more than 5%. Let's say maybe 5% is the ceiling,

and the floor is zero, literally. Like, we have people who are like, hey, I went through the work, I got it integrated, and I literally haven't got a single booking through Google Vacation Rentals. And this is not over a month or two months. This is over like a calendar year or something like that. They haven't got any results from it. So yeah, I mean, 2019, to be fair, that was the launch. It was part of Google Travel back then. In the search results, though, it was more like 2122. So maybe we're being a little unfair, you know, by saying, Hey, right, sure, it was less prominent. But I mean,

now, if you do pretty much any vacation rental related search on Google, you see the vacation rental block in the search results. They used to be pretty limited to just the core vacation on terms. In fact, there was a while where it was not showing for cabin rental terms. I had a client who was like, oh yeah, we're getting away with it a little bit longer

till Google figures out that cabin rental and vacation rental are basically the same thing. And then of course they figured it out and now it's showing on those blocks. But it's interesting because like you said, they added all the support. This sounds like a simple thing. But we're doing the research ahead of time in advance of today's episode. And despite the fact that you can, in theory, give

Google the right markup on your website, you don't need to, quote unquote, need to technically use an integration partner. It doesn't matter because you still have to fill out a form with Google and say, Hey, can you please place me into this, you know, into the system or into the Google vacation rental block? And I'm assuming they, you know, into the system or into the Google Vacation Rental Block? And I'm assuming they, you know, are going to approve and deny people based on some criteria of which they haven't published or let be publicly known.

So it's hard to know exactly what that is. But just think about that for a second. So if you're trying to grow the user base of a product or of any sort of software application, anything, you're going to make it as easy as possible for people to onboard into that product. Google has not done that. Google has had something where it's like, hey, we're going to make a list of integration partners, that integration partner list. You're going to have to use their stuff. You're going to have to use their checkout pages in some cases. Or hey, you can do the markup, but then you're going to fill out a form. And then who knows if that form is actually going to go anywhere. And my feedback on that form has been that it hasn't gone anywhere. I don't know who it's going to, but I filled it out before and just

never heard anything back. I never even got an email email saying like, we got your form, you know, which is kind of like a best practice, you know, type thing in my experience for other things. So yeah, it's, it's a, it's not a growing platform and it's hard to look at the success today or the lack of success today and feel like they're going to figure it out. In fact, this was just one thing I was doing when we were trying to figure out exactly when it launched, you and I weren't exactly sure. So we had to go back and research and we found some lovely articles from the folks over at skiff.

So credit to them because they deserve the credit for this. But we, I did this out of curiosity. I started searching the names of the people who are in the press release or like in the media in 2019 and not a single one of these people, we don't have to name names and we're not trying to slam these people, but not a single one of those people is still working on the product at Google. In fact, a few of those people aren't at Google at all anymore. They're at other companies.

And then a few other people are reassigned to other divisions inside of Google. So it kind of reminds me a little bit, this is a strange comparison maybe. So but follow me through it. It kind of reminds me of what's happening right now. Flipkies eventually, I guess it's going to get folded away and just put back into TripAdvisor rentals. But at one point, Flipkies was a thriving, growing OTA platform for the vacation industry. I'm thinking back to VRMA, I feel like this would have been 2016, 2017, maybe somewhere in that range, where Flipkies had a bunch of integration issues and property managers were there with pitchforks in New Orleans at the VRMA event saying, I'm really upset you Flipkies. You're making mistakes. But we can laugh about it now.

At the time, there were people really pissed because there was double bookings and there was stuff going on. And it was 100% a Flipkies fault. But think about that awareness and the fact that customers were mad proves that they were getting a lot of bookings from Flipkies. And we had customers, we had clients we were working with back then. This was when I was at the last agency that were getting 20%, 25% of their bookings through Flipkies. So it's not an insane thing to say these listing sites, some of them just don't seem to have the same staying power or OTA platforms or what do you want to say, don't seem to have the same staying power as the big three. Now, I think we've kind of settled in now on this big three, we've got Airbnb, Verbo, and Booking.com,

at least here in the US and North America, maybe we could say broadly. So Google just hasn't been able to crack any meaningful market share. And in theory, they have high-in-trend traffic coming in, but they don't have the inventory. They don't have the right listing showing up there. It's too tricky to get on board. It's too tricky to get everything in the right place there. And to your point, Google doesn't even know what to do with the data. They kind of have a part of it, some of it, but all they do is just default back to hotels when you're using their new AI or, you know, LLM tools. So I don't know what the solution is, but I know the solution is making it easier. Part of it is making it easier to put your properties in there and then getting more, you know, sort of adoption and use

case for people actually going and browsing listings. And then they can start from that point. That's my take on it. Maybe you have some other thoughts as well. I mean, it is I think that the you know, we go through that list of partners and that that is the first step. I mean, you can put all the schema on there that you want, but the Google is very explicit in saying this is after you've reached out to a partner or done something like that. And again, to the coming give credit where credit is due. They have there are some partnerships out there that are recognizable names. And again, to the coming give credit where credit is due. They have there are some partnerships out there

that are recognizable names. I mean, rentals United is here. owner res is here. We just talked about that. Next packs is here. Lodgeify is here. I mean, these are some names that are fairly recognizable host hostify host fully host away I think the hospitable all those big H's are all there. I think Mark Simpson just did his his little recap of the last year. And when you look at the top four integrations that he has coming through his websites, the Hostaway, Hospitable, HostFully, and I think Guesty were his top four.

So volume-wise, they're picking the right integration partners. And I guess my, we'll say, well, the inside pool there is probably that they're relying on these PM companies to push more of the Google side of things. They're not selling it hard. And they're not, you know, where we get the calls every day on Google ads saying, hey, can we update this? It looks like your campaigns just aren't running as effectively as they could be. Sure, fine, whatever. I get that. But I've never had anybody reach out and I don't know if this is happening on the PM level, talking about, hey, you're a vacation rental company. Why aren't you or you're using HostAway? Are you using hospitable? That's something that if I were Google and listen, please, I mean, I would love for them to listen to this, have those team members that are right now reaching out to your inactive or less

than active or less than optimized Google ads accounts, have them reach out to these PM partners because I certainly think that that is a more effective way to maybe dive deeper into this space. I would say they're going to continue to struggle until they get the inventory. You're not going to get the inventory unless you get people connecting up somehow there. So whether it's a cost thing, I don't think it's a cost thing because that's not what I... It is. That's the ears on the ground. That's not the problem. It's either my PMS doesn't support it or it's too difficult to do it. The process is too difficult. It's either my PMS doesn't support it or it's too difficult to do it.

The process is too difficult. It's too technical, whatever it is. And it is. And if you're someone trying to go about it on your own, then you have to reach out directly to Google and you have to do the work. So the overall value of the information that they're trying to present, I mean, look at the categories that they're giving you the opportunity to present right on your listing apartment bungalow, cabin, chalet, cottage. I don't get geet. Okay, usually converted cottage or barn. That's the geet. Excuse me. But I can remember going back to resorts and lodges

writing about all these different accommodation types. So I know people are doing the searches for these and the fact that Google is giving you the opportunity to present this information, air quotes, giving you the opportunity, we could give travelers such a more robust travel planning experience. So maybe that's not going to be in the front end. Maybe it's not going to be in Google travel. Maybe it is going to somehow be in some type of AI configuration in Gemini, in the newest version of the more conversational Gemini. I don't know where it is, but we know that this is a huge area of... It's just, there's too many searches taking place. I mean, we thousands, tens of thousands of millions of

searches taking place for vacation rental related keywords, Google's not maximizing that. Or maybe they are. Maybe they're happy with the 20 bucks a click 15 bucks, something like that. I was gonna say, I'll push against you a little bit in two respects. And we talked about this in our outline. In Google terms, this is not meaningful. In our in our bubble, this is no, it's what a Google terms is not meaningful. In our bubble, this is meaningful.

But in Google terms, it's not meaningful. And I think that what you're describing of why haven't they built the infrastructure or the teams or the support to be like, you know, why is there any reason that Google Vacation Rental shouldn't have a booth at a VRMA event or at a Darm event and be there and saying recruiting inventory. I think from a logical business development standpoint, you're spot on. But I think from a Google perspective, it's like, does that move the needle for us? Right? Like Google, Google does so much revenue, like they look at that and they go, and maybe the argument I can make here is the fact that they haven't monetized it was actually its death wish. Because by not monetizing it, they made it where they

couldn't justify any headcount or any investment into the product or into, hey, let's get more integration partners, let's figure out how to scrape more, you know, Google vacation rental listings and put them in the platform, etc, etc. By doing that, they actually choked it because then they can never justify making the investment, right? So back to my Flipk and TripAdvisor example, Flipk was obviously crashing and declining and an insignificant amount of TripAdvisor revenue. So they said, let's just get rid of it. It's not worth it anymore. Which is again, funny rewind the clock. And it was a meaningful amount of revenue. I can make the same case that someone inside of Google travel, there's some head of Google travel, they go, we want this product,

there's a reason they haven't killed it. But I would I would not be surprised at all if it did get killed, because it doesn't make any money. So at this moment, it's more of an anchor tied to the leg of Google travel than it is this thing that's, you know, making a meaningful difference. So maybe what this this in my mind would be the first sign is they test removing the block from the search results, right? You know, it's not that they're not gonna kill right away by doing that, but it's like, ooh, that's gonna put a, you know, a significant less traffic coming into it.

We'll leave the tab on the google.com slash travel, but we'll take it out of the search results when you do a search for Destin Florida vacation rentals or San Diego vacation rentals or whatever the case may be, which maybe that's me hoping that that happens, maybe, you know, a little bit, right? Cause then my number one quote unquote, number one ranked clients would start to do a little bit

better in Google search as with pretty much anybody else. But that will be a sign in my mind that it's not there. So that'd be my take on it is that by not monetizing it on the surface, that sounds good. Oh, Google is going to give me free traffic. I'm going to put my inventory in there. It's right in the top of the SERPs. Of course, like that all makes sense on paper.

But the downside is that now they can't make any business case for investing in it because they're not driving any revenue off of it. Whereas hotels, they make significantly more revenue and it's much simpler problem set. Well, and I ultimately think there that, I mean, we know where the hand that's feeding them is. It's booking. I mean, it's Expedia. That's where six to $7 billion, I mean, that was three or four years ago, could be $10 billion. That's a lot of revenue to be coming in. And even on the meta search side of things, it's an interesting play on the hotel side, seeing those excessively large numbers of bookings coming through in that area. At that point, it does make sense because at that point, the individual hotels themselves are bidding against an Expedia, are bidding against the booking to get their own,

just like we see now, the results of the example we have in the screenshot is hospitable. That's the booking engine where you're seeing, but it's the official website where you're taking that booking. Well, when the Expedia and booking are going against that base website, your branded website, and you're doing revenue management properly, yeah, there's going to be, there's going to be that bill is going to be a little lower on the booking side of things. And it's going to be a little higher on the individual advertiser. And let's face it, you've got a little more consistent money coming through from booking

and Expedia. And I'm sure they're calling collections for some of those other advertisers that it is. I get the business practicality of it, but it's still, I think at some point along the lines people are going to expect more. It is. And maybe it's after who knows what the fall of, and those heavily air quoted fall of Google looks like it's not happening anytime soon. But as pieces do get pulled

off, I think travel could be a standalone product of some kind. So maybe it doesn't have to be, maybe it's not under the alphabet umbrella or maybe it's absorbed somewhere else. But I think that the search results aren't getting better. So some type of experience on Google has got to get better for people to continue to use the search engine because in 2025, I think you're going to see a lot more discussions in the search engine journals and search engine lands and search engine watches of what is that user habit? What is that user behavior? I mean, do we see more of a shift away from the 90% search impression share? Does that go down to Does the market share dip below 90% for the first time in a decade? Where does that actually happen? And what types of searches are beginning to go down? Because that is going to tell us who's giving a better experience. I don't think Chat

GPT is giving a better travel experience. I don't think anybody's really... I mean, Airbnb is giving the desired experience, but I don't think it's a better experience by any means. So it's kind of a fun looking forward type of episode as well of, man, I hope Google Vacation Rentals is something that is more beneficial, that it's more than 1% of revenue, that all of these things, all the KPIs that are driving a better outlook for the product itself, I hope those are positive, but we can draw back and see why the struggles are there right now too. Yeah, and I think if you're a property manager,

the thing that should scare you the most about Google is not like the, so there were some hot takes at the Darm conference, oh, Google's dead. It's gonna be such a slow, slow, my take on it, this is, if I could do an analogy, it would be that Google search, the product, is a glacier. And it's more like this global warming phenomenon where it's like, Oh, we're probably on a bad track right now if you're a Google, but it's also like we're a glacier and like we're losing 1% of our surface area every year. But the good news is guys, we've

got 98% surface area, you know, into the most valuable queries. And is this really going to make a super meaningful difference in 2025? Probably not in 26 probably not. I don't know, time will tell, you know, because like Google is trying to Google you could argue is almost cannibalizing their own business with using Gemini and stuff like that, because there there's no ads in there. I think you're a fool though, if you assume that these large language model tools are going to replace search, and they're never going to have any ads in them. So the experience you have today is probably not the LLM experience you're going to get, you know, let's say 10 years from now, let's let's look way ahead. If you're using search dbt or perplexity or some of these things, you're going to do a search results are going to come back. And it's going to, you know, let's say 10 years from now, let's let's look way ahead. If you're using search dbt or perplexity

or some of these things, you're going to do a search results are going to come back. And it's going to be you know, there's going to be ads in there, right? They got to monetize that traffic. In fact, generating a result on an LLM is significantly more expensive than generating a result in Google, Google has caches results where you're going to referencing them, Google's bringing up a cache version of a page or search results, you know, much more quickly, and

they're not going and generating on demand, you know, based on your query, what the actual response or website should be, which is what these like LLM based search engines do. So again, if if a switch was slipped tomorrow, Google 301 redirected to search dbt.com tomorrow, let's just say to a different product, and open AI had to pay that bill, they could probably pay it because they got Microsoft behind them with billions dollars. But yeah, long story short, that is not the optimal way that

most people use the web to a lot of us. And there was a study about this recently, I saw the other day on LinkedIn, where it was like, so much of Google search is navigational. It's like you're going to Google and you're just searching like, you're just searching like, Gmail login, or people are just searching like Facebook login, or they're searching for, you know, Nike clothes, and they're just going to the Nike website. So a good chunk of Google search is basically just like not really providing any value. They've always been skimming the brand, you know, advertising spend out of there. And that's sort of a hot topic that we could say

for another another day, because it does work. And I wish we didn't have to run branded ads, but we do. Because if we don't run them, someone else will come and take that traffic from us. But yeah, how much money is Google made since, you know, let's say, over the last 10 years of just people having to bid and pay Google to get traffic on their branded keywords, a heck of a lot, I would assume, you know, in the billions of dollars if you look collectively across, you know, all the different industries out there that are paying for branded Google ads. So yeah, it's, it's, it's, uh, I don't think there's reason to think it's gonna get better because I don't see anything in this coming year unless they just massively start to invest the product that's gonna make it, you know, make it better.

So you add on some of these points, I just want to like recap, maybe someone here has not used this product or hasn't used Google vacation rentals in some time. You mentioned there's different types of units that you can list there. There's a decent support widget or article section, I will say. There's eight support articles

that tie into Google vacation rental. We'll put some links in the show so people can check this out. The one thing that I want to do some more research into is this brand support. So I'm trying to figure out how I can do that. I have a client who has that hotel center access, but I'm trying to figure out how I can get into there and see what's going on. So in theory, you could make the branding of your actual listing on the Google Vacation Rental product

a little bit stronger. So I'm kind of curious what'll end up happening there. In this section, they give feedback and guidance on best practices. So this is good to hear from Google, recommended resolution of a photo 2448 pixels wide 1366 tall, keep the image under 10 megabytes is what they say, which kind of blows my mind, we try to keep images under like 100 kilobytes, not 10 megabytes. So that was kind of weird to see in their like best practices. And then they give some best, you know, here's how you should include or not include people brightness, you know, photos, all these kinds of things. So if you're looking to learn more about like the Google Vacation on a product, I think

that we can put some links in the show notes. But yeah, my take on this is just that like, I don't think it's gonna get better. I don't believe that there's reason to think that 25 is going to be stronger. If anything, I would say it's more likely to end up on killed by Google.com. We'll put a link to that in the show notes with this idea. And I do that sort of ingest and just sort of joking, but also realizing that killed by Google.com reminds me that they can be this large platform

that has all this reach in theory. And they've Google has taken a lot of swings and misses like there is there a reason that Google circles or you know, like the original version of Google plus should not have worked like it should have worked. They have all the users they have all the traffic, they couldn't get it to work. You know, is there not a reason that some of these things like Google created a gaming service, I'm just looking at the homepage of killed by google.com right now called stadia. I think it's how you say it's Dada. Yeah. Um, three years, you know, it lasted 2019 to 2022 and they killed it in 2023. So they had, they've created literally hundreds and you know, a hundred, 200 plus products that have ultimately ended

up being, you know, moved on from killed, you know, and not proceeded with. And it's because honestly, none of these are meaningful to the business. If these were all existed today is Chromecastcast gonna make the difference between Google making or breaking this next quarter? No, it's search ads, dude. Like that's where they make them bulk of their money, search ads, and then they make a non-insignificant portion now from like cloud services, like email hosting.

There's a few other things, obviously, they make money from. But even like YouTube, it's just wrapped up in advertising. It's an advertising platform. And then they make some revenue from people paying for premium just because they don't wanna see ads, right? The only reason they're paying for premium is they don't want to see ads. So it's like the money that's they're charging there is just a way to bypass what they don't want to see, which is advertising. So that's kind

of my, my take on this. Go ahead. I mean, even think about, and it's that thing we tie a bow in here, but think about reference hosting services. I mean, they just handed over, I think, was it 25 million domains? They just handed that over to Squarespace and said, no, we can't manage this anymore. We don't want to manage this. I'm sure there's a lot of technical infrastructure that it takes to manage all that. I wouldn't even begin to understand that. But how many customers do you think they have? How many customers does Google domain have, right? In the hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of customers? Yeah, millions, guaranteed. And that's right. And it seems and that seems like a pretty,

I'm sure it's the tech that got them there. But the margin on like just having people buy domains to you and just hosting and supporting that, that seems like it would be pretty, you'd be making pretty good money there. So I mean, there are far smarter people, I hope, that are doing things at Google and that are making decisions at Google. And, and now I don't think that they're doing it for the greater good. They're doing it for profit, just like everybody else. And we don't live in an altruistic world where it is. I mean, that's the reality. It's I love the altruistic world that the idealistic world I live in an altruistic world where yeah it is. I mean that's the reality. I love the altruistic world, the idealistic world. I live in that world a lot I think sometimes, probably

more than I should. But the reality is this is business. This is still a business and Google still understands that this is where the revenue is going to come from. We can't jeopardize that and the decisions we make regarding subproducts that aren't search are going to come from, we can't jeopardize that. And the decisions we make regarding sub products that aren't search are going to just, you know, be a decision tree off of that. They are not going to be standalone vacation rent. Google vacation rentals is going to drive us all the revenue we need going forward. Yeah, we're going to happen. Well, let's think about it this way, just just as a way to set the context up.

And this is I'm doing some quick Googling here. So my numbers are if they're wrong, then we can correct in the show notes. But according to Investing.com, Google will end 2024 most likely with $278 billion in pipeline revenue, which is just an unfathomable number. The entire vacation rental industry is maybe $100 billion. So Google in six months does more revenue than the entire worth of the entire vacation rental industry is period. And we're however many years into this, right? So again, that's just in context,

the grand scheme of things, how many advertising dollars are spent by Airbnb broadly, and then even Airbnb on Google, like they're the big dogs in the pond. And at the end of the day, Google likes the revenue, I'm sure Airbnb gives them, and Booking gives them, and Expedia Group gives them. But if they all went away tomorrow,

their revenue would be impacted, but it wouldn't be that meaningful. And those are people that outspend, you know, the small business owner even collectively by a factor of 10 to 120 to one, if we added up all the small businesses, and we compared them to the budget that Airbnb has just for Florida, or just for Texas or just for South Carolina, right, you would, it would actually, you know, pale comparison, right, available comparison. So it's interesting, you know, I guess what the let's call this a bit of predictions comparison, right? It would pale a comparison. So it's interesting.

I guess, let's call this a bit of predictions episode, right? I predict that this will not probably get stronger in 2025. Maybe we could do a little revisit a year from now if that appeals to you and see kind of where we're at here. Or if they kill it, then we can do, ah, I gotcha. We got it. Which is good. We got that all on a recording there. So yeah, that's it for today. Like I said, people might be listening in the new year. So if that's the case, then hope you had a Merry Christmas. Hope you have a happy new year. We appreciate you if you're listening in.

One little gift that you can give us, hopefully there's something that's not gonna get killed this year, maybe like Google vacation rentals will, is our need for more reviews. So go to your podcast app of choice, leave us a review. We appreciate that. And then we can keep going things and make things even better and more awesome in 2025.

Appreciate you. We'll catch you on the next episode. Thanks much.