The secret economics of Google Street View

Okay, I'm going to Google Street View in Zanzibar. Right here. But I'm going to try to  convince you that the most interesting direction to look is not to the  left or to the right, but down.

Why does the Revolutionary Government  of Zanzibar have a logo right here on this truck, which doesn't look like  a normal Google Street View car? That's because this is the world  of unofficial Google Street View. All these lines are street  views that Google didn't make, but that still show up on Google Maps.

This is the visualization of a secret economy that you can only see when you look  down. It shows up everywhere. From hustling realtors to explorers in the Australian bush.

Wow. I talked to him. To off roaders across the world in Utah.

Just look at this terrain. And look who's driving it. All the way to government corporate partnerships  that have carved out a unique spot in the Google Street View world.

Right there. I  went through hundreds of Street View images, I talked to a ton of people, and I came  up with five categories for the secret economics of Google Street View. It is surprising, it is secretive, and it says something about the economy at large.

You just have to know which direction to look. Hello everybody. “Hey man.

” “I've actually never played  this game in my whole life. ” “You're gonna love it, Jochem. ” So last week I got together with some YouTubers, um, Neo, EchoZero, PresentPast, Chuppl, and  they all put me in last place in GeoGuessr.

If you don't know what GeoGuessr is, and I'm  surprised that there are a lot of people who don't, basically it is a game where you are  plopped into a random location on Google Street View. You then have to place a pin that  is your best guess as to where in the world you are. The closer you are to the correct  location, the more points that you get.

“I always get distracted with these because  it's just so fasc- there's fascinating stuff that's not helpful to figure out the place. ” GeoGuessr is not just a fun Street View game, though, it is actually a good lens to look at  the official economies around Google Street View. It's 1907.

This book of photo auto maps,  they printed street level pictures next to directions. Everyone knew that this  was a great idea. A hundred years later, the tech caught up.

Google Street View launched  in 2007. I actually want to show you one of the earliest shots taken on Google Street View. Right  here, you can actually go back to 2007 and see it.

You can actually go forward in time and see the  improvements in the camera technology. Here's 2024. Here's 2007.

The map of official  Google Street View coverage like this, it is intricate and expansive and beautiful, and  these official maps have their own economics. Out of the $80 billion google earnings pie in the  first quarter of 2024, it's not really broken out. But uh, Morgan Stanley estimated that $11  billion came from Google Maps.

Street View mainly makes Google Maps better. However,  Google does charge GeoGuessr and other services a specific Street View API fee to do all  that clicking around. Not just here, in the game, but also here, on the map.

Street View adds so  much value that competitor programs are common. There's Mapillary, which is owned by  Meta. They have some street level images, and it hooks up to OpenStreetMap.

They've  also posted some 3D walkthroughs, so maybe it's a Metaverse thing? We don't really know.  All I know is I'm kind of making myself dizzy going around this.

The big tech players all have  Street View competitors, including China's Baidu. So you won't find a lot of China imagery on  Google Street View, but on Baidu Maps, you can walk around, like, all day. And there's just  fascinating stuff to look at.

But the official Street View economy, it's kind of a rounding error  for these big tech companies. It's the unofficial economy where these things get interesting. So all these are unofficial.

That means they are locations that weren't made by Google,  but were uploaded by contributors to Google Street View as a platform. “The unofficial thing. is, is incredibly challenging here.

” We were not playing a normal GeoGuessr map. GeoGuessr normally draws from official  Google Street View imagery, but we were playing a map called An Unofficial Street World. This is all the official Street View coverage in say, the United States.

But there's a lot of  unofficial coverage too. That's stuff that anyone can upload to the platform. Let's go to Africa. 

Here you can see the difference between official and unofficial is even starker. The circles on  this map are photospheres: 360 degree pictures where you can't walk around like in Street  View because it's people taking pictures. Mike, in my GeoGuessr game, has  actually made a bunch of these.

“I was doing these all the time and uploading  them and you get so many views and so many like Google maps credits. ” What do the points give you? “Um, it gives you like google maps cred. 

You know, like, like street cred for Google Maps? ” “Street cred, Phil. Street cred.

” Photospheres are simpler than Street View images, but they're actually really cool. Here,  let's go to Cuba. All the little blue circles that show up on this map, those are all  photospheres that people have taken in Cuba.

You are on the street in Cuba. This is  just because somebody took this picture and uploaded it to Street View. You can go to really  interesting places with these photospheres.

Um, I have explored in Turkmenistan. Cool. Night  scene.

You can even check out locations in North Korea. There aren't a lot of them,  but the ones that there are, are pretty insane. And you can see if you look down, we have this  pair of shoes to thank for this photosphere.

But this gets really interesting when it comes  to Street View images that people have uploaded. Let's go back across the world. So let me  find this.

There's this big trail that runs for a really long distance in Virginia. And Darren? He and his friends mapped all of it.

But remember the first  rule of Street View. Look down. This is the first time that I've ever  wanted an ATV.

Whoa, this is sick. “We wanted really high quality cameras. It looks  almost like a UFO with like six, eight lenses around it.

And it's heavy. It's extremely heavy.  So we needed something that we knew we could cover 45 miles.

The ATV was probably the solution to  that, it's, like, it can carry something heavy, it's not a car, it's not, you know, even  a small car, it's not a motorcycle, uh, and it was probably the safest thing we could do. ” So Darren went to a lot of work to do this, I mean, he got permits in different counties,  he tackled big file management issues, and he uploaded it all, just so that this  trail could be easier for people to use. There are also really fun Street View practical  jokes.

Let me show you this one in Sweden. Somebody put their RV. And you can go inside!

There are also really useful applications of this. Let's go back across the world again to  Virginia. I talked to Peter, who goes to rural parts of Virginia, and he has mapped a ton of  roads there.

He just goes down these roads and maps them because it helps out first responders. “The addresses is really where Google lacks a lot here. So, that's what got me into it.

And then the  hydrants was, uh, we, as first responders, we have hydrant maps, but, but they're kind of proprietary  and not as easy to use as data being on open street maps. So, and it started, I guess it  started primarily for the, for the hydrants. And now, I mean, my reason for doing it is, is beyond,  is more than that.

It's just, it's a hobby and I enjoy it. So yeah, in rural areas, it'll work. The  addresses aren't, I mean, houses aren't all right along the road.

One might be right facing the  road. Another one might be back a half mile lane. ” If you're in an extreme situation,  like the data has to be accurate.

Like that could be a big difference, right? “You need to know where you're going and have a general layout of the land. So,  but, but it is very helpful.

You know, because there's a lot of places where there's  two or three houses back at private road and they're just not labeled very well at all. ” All of these are a contribution on a big stage. These have millions of views and  that is where the next level comes in.

SEO, search engine optimization. It is a $68. 27  billion industry.

It determines what shows up at the top of search results. Actually, I have no  idea if that stat is true, but whoever published it has pretty good SEO. If you are a business,  showing up on Street View is a type of SEO.

It doesn't just let people tour your grocery in  Doha. I love this one, by the way. Here are the proud owners, and here's this guy who's just  like, Can I please buy something and leave?

It might also get you more cred with Google search. Google builds this up with a list of trusted vendors. It's like in this promo video,  a photographer comes in, photographs your business, and it theoretically  might up your cred with Google.

This is in the interest of both the owner and the  photographer. So let's say you have an inn in the Bahamas. You might want to be able to give  people a tour of your inn so that they can see that it's nice before they book.

And  you are willing to hire altavistacg. com to do it for you. In Australia, I found this  realtor who did it for his neighborhood.

Awesome and kind of hilarious. Google lets you put your logo at the bottom of an image that you upload. I could go on all day here.

I love exploring these random street views and photospheres.  I want to go ahead and tell you about one though that I get into in more depth  on my newsletter. Let's plop us down.

The mystery is, what is inside this building  and who is this man? If you don't know, I have a newsletter that I publish when every  video comes out. It lets me write an article about some fascinating corner of my research that  I wasn't able to get into in a video proper.

And this time it is the identity of this person and  why he is in this random building all by himself. I think you'll find it kind of interesting.  The newsletter is totally free to sign up for.

It's hosted by Patreon, but it's  free to sign up for the newsletter. It allows me to communicate with you when I  have a new video coming out, it lets you know what I'm doing on Patreon in general,  and if I have any big plans in the future. So please go ahead and check that out. 

It supports the channel. Go ahead and subscribe if you want to find out his story.  So hopefully I've proven to you by now that photographers and businesses, they have a  significant corner in the Street View world, but there is a bigger picture too.

This  map of official Google Street View sites, it is kind of a proxy map for economic investment,  as viewed by a company in Silicon Valley. So there are concerted efforts in the  unofficial map to represent areas to tourists. Right there.

I'm just curious  to find out why people are doing it. “I've probably added, I don't know, about 500 odd  kilometers to Street View over the years. ” Wow!

“18 years ago I started a bushwalking business,  um, which is what we call hiking in Australia, and, um, I started documenting, uh, bushwalks,  but on a website. So I started getting all these questions that I, were just difficult to  answer. So my check notes were really detailed, and somebody would ask, uh, questions like,  How tall is the bridge?

Because I'm scared of heights. Um, and you'd go, oh, okay,  interesting. And so I started, you know, I get a bit carried away with these things.

So  I started looking into things like, are there grading systems for exposure and height and all  those sort of things. And, um, and then realized, okay. Photos.

It says a thousand words, all  that sort of stuff, um, but the beauty of a photo is it's not that it's the thousand words,  it's that people can answer their own questions very quickly, right? Uh, and so I actually built  my own 360 degree camera, because it didn't really exist for consumers, and so it's basically a, um,  I took four GoPros, rip the backs off of them, rip the guts off of them and stuck them into a  camera and mounted them to a pole to my pack. So as I walked, um, they'll just take photos,  um, about every five meters or ten meters.

” Wow. “And that became particularly important as we started to look into  documenting walks for people with disabilities. It's not just about people in wheelchairs, it's  not just about If there are steps or no steps, um, it's about, um, all those 10, 000 questions  that people have.

Like, what's the toilet like? ” Right. “Those sort of thousand questions you just can't answer.

” So what Matt's doing is interesting. He does promote his business through these uploads,  but he's also just making it easier for people to go on hikes. Across the world, At  Your Leisure TV and Chad, who I talked to, have a kind of more complex reason for  mapping a ton of off road trails in the state.

“Hi everybody, welcome to At  Your Leisure, I'm Chad Booth. ” “I'm Ria Rossi Booth. ” “We just started our 23rd season, so we'd worked with the off-road community over a number of years  on areas of land access and roads on public lands, and the previous attempts at mapping Which we had  promoted and been involved with were just awful.

So we started working with the state. And  they said, well, yeah, we can do this. Uh, maybe you can get grants.

And we started going  to cities. And, and they could get matching funds for the grants. We got, we got a couple of  retailers to sponsor with us.

We got a gas company that has truck stops all over the country. They paid for the fuel. One off road dealer that, uh, sprung for us to get a truck and camper  so the guy could stay out on the trail that did the maps.

It cost us about five to six thousand  dollars per trail to actually do everything and have proper insurance and clearance and pay  for the equipment and the gas and the editing. ” Everyone I've talked to, nobody is, has been half  hearted about it. Everybody has really committed.

If you look down on the truck, you can  see all these stakeholders that he's talking about. There's the Utah DNR, which is  promoting trail use so that these trails aren't closed down for not being used enough. New Mexico Tourism has uploaded a ton of images to Street View, which makes sense  because it helps them promote the state.

This goes to a bigger scale too, because  countries have incentives to add Google Street View imagery. Let me show you. It is being mapped through basically a community effort that is nothing less than  miraculous.

That is their joke, not mine. Okay. A similar thing happened with some of the  Street View imagery in Zimbabwe, which was just uploaded to help promote the country.

And there is Zanzibar. They weren't on Google Street View until World Travel  in 360 put them there for the country. “Uh, we've been in touch with the government of  Zanzibar, and honestly, we tried to sell them, to say, guys, Google will probably not come there,  but we are a company dedicated to that.

We are doing this with you. We can do it for you. And  of course, um, underpayment.

The government of Zanzibar says that, uh, it's a fantastic project  and everything else, but for that. And so at the moment realized that probably it was a common  problem in all the African countries. They say, oh, we can propose the same to the  other countries and find solutions.

Someone else that is going to pay for the bills  because generally in Africa country is not easy to find budget towards something like that.  We've been in touch with the Insta360 the camera manufacturer that the camera they are  still using to do this kind of jobs and we talked with them and said guys we are going to  do something unique in the world because it was, again, was the world's first project  of its kind. Why you don't help us?

You cover the cost, we sponsorize.  So they got Insta360 to sponsor this as kind of a pilot program. ” People watching this might not appreciate just the amount of organization  that you have to do.

In the meantime, you're in these places that haven't even been  seen very frequently in the rest of the world. “You're driving around all day, so  beautiful, you go places, you meet people, you get stuck in beautiful places, but at the  end of the day, you need to do like with six terabytes of data, then you need to stitch it. ” In addition to uploading 360 degree imagery, World Travel in 360 has actually uploaded  really nice high-res footage from above.

You can see the difference here between  the satellite imagery that Google supplies and satellite imagery. The lush imagery that's  been provided by world travel in 360. This scale of advertising is fascinating, but it is not  the last part of the street view economy that comes in the data.

This is Oklahoma. Right here. And if you go to the newest Street  View image, it is from somebody called BCAO.

That is the Beckham County Assessor's  Office. They are using Street View for the data. They're trying to figure out values  for different parts of the county.

It's actually similar to some of the surveying that's  being done in Croatia here by Geogrupa. That is also the expertise of a  Finnish company called Autori. They are actually notorious amongst GeoGuessr  players, because their cameras aren't quite as good as Google's.

They all use Street View because  it is a platform for data about places and that is as or maybe more valuable than the Advertising  and that is why the Gambia hired Ripplnami. “And so we have a software that helps identify  undeclared rental income from landlords. And we had deployed this software in Uganda and it's  been wildly successful.

So The Gambia wanted to see if they could, um, get the system for  themselves. And during the demonstration, the, the, the Uganda Revenue Authority is showing them,  you know, here's all the landlords and here's where you can see their properties and here's  where you can see the properties on Street View. And it was as if we had landed somebody on  the moon.

They were like, what is it? They thought it was the most impressive thing that  they've ever seen. And it's long story short, we ended up getting a contract with The Gambia  government.

And so we needed a way to be able to determine through an algorithm what do we  estimate the rental value could be in every, any particular area. And, um, wanted for  the inputs of the algorithm, we need the, the area of the building and how it, of stories it  is. And so will we need how many stories it that it is.

So let’s do 360 imagery and capture and  map all the streets around Banjul and Kanifing so that we for our own project can determine  the, the, the stories of buildings to go into our algorithms to determine rent. And at the same  time, we thought, well, let's publish all this to Google so that it can benefit everybody because  it has so many benefits in terms of, you know, um, business opportunities for businesses to  be able to put themselves there on the map. ” Okay.

So why make this video about all the  little economic corners of Street View? Street View already makes clear the  little differences that make up our world. “That on ramp does not look very good.

” I think that looking at the economics behind Street View is another fascinating layer  to add over all of it. This brings up lots of big questions about global wealth, about  tech, and even about what makes people want to go on an adventure to a new location.  I think those are really valid questions, but I want to end this on an optimistic note.

The unofficial map of Google Street View coverage, it is a map of a bunch of people who  are proud of the places where they live, and who want the entire world to see them. Should  they have to do it? That is a fair question, but their work means that we should take the time to  look around, and maybe we should look down, too.

Hey, that's it for this video. Thank you for  being here. A lot of people to thank.

Of course, I want to thank everyone who talked to me for  this project and, uh, everyone who I played GeoGuessr with. So, there are a lot of links  in the description that you can check out, a lot of channels to check out, too. Um, and yeah,  it was just interesting to kind of dig into this.

There's a reaction video over on Patreon.  Going there supports the channel. And I mentioned my newsletter article,  which I actually think is kind of, kind of a cool mystery.

So you can check that  out and sign up for that for free. If you want, the link to that is in the description as well.  And otherwise I think that's it for this one.

I'd love to know what you think about this. What's  your favorite find on Google Street View? Where do you think this is going in the future?

It's a  fascinating thing and there's a lot there. So I'd love to know what you think too. Alright, thanks  for watching and I will see you in the next one.