Seems like a fair move to me. If Hollywood studios like Disney are able to use it for free right now to save time and money producing shows and movies why shouldn't Epic get a fair fee for the product that enables those savings?
You seem to be under the impression that I think it is moving in the direction I'd like it to. I do not think that. I said that if it were offered to have a paid service I would prefer it.
Looking at calculated stats from 2016 which admittedly are out of date showed an ARPU of $6.70 a quarter. Assuming that has gone up by 10x and it's $70 per quarter I think a paid service is well within the realm of possibility.
As someone who no doubt is in the minority of users, I don't think having a paid option for those that would use it would have a big impact on the bottom line. Most people would pile onto the free service and let Google suck up all the data they want. For people like myself that don't click on ads intentionally, they'd probably make more money off of me individually by taking my money directly.
I'm arguing that add blockers are causing companies like Google to fight ad blockers. They aggressively mine data because it's profitable to target ads with it.
If millions of people didn't use ad blockers there wouldn't be much of a reason for them to spend engineering dollars on Web Identity DRM tools to attempt to prevent changes to web pages by blockers.
I use ad blockers but it isn't lost on me that services I use cost money to operate. That money is provided by selling data and ad clicks.
Because of ad blockers trying to cut off the revenue source we end up with a battle between companies and users where the most popular browser on the planet is adding things like this - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/googles-web-integrity-api-sounds-like-drm-for-the-web/
I'd much rather provide the revenue for the services I find valuable and not have a ton of middleware enforcing web drm to ensure I'm advertised to.
Yes, considering the oil company doesn't own the gas station and still gets paid for the fuel. The person you're stealing from is the owner of the gas station who purchases the fuel and then in many areas sells fuel with very low margin in hopes of you coming into the store for snacks and drinks to make money on higher margin products. So even if they are selling a large amount of fuel, they aren't making a lot of profit to make up for the theft.
Your math doesn't make sense. In 2022 Google had $253B in annual ad revenue. Most estimates that I find have Google services users at 1 Billion+ on the low end. The Ad Revenue per User would be less than $25 a month.
That is an amount that I would pay for all the services I use. I already pay for YouTube premium which is more than half that cost.
It's not for everyone. There are many categories of people; those who couldn't afford a monthly fee, those that would rather get a free service for data collection and ads even if they could afford it, and those of us that would happily pay for services if the data collection and ads went away.
There is an argument that the services would be less valuable if data weren't collected to build the quality of results, like maps data and what not. I would argue that enough people would prefer to go the ad supported route to make that argument moot though.
I personally find a lot of Google's services valuable to use and like them. You may hate Google search, but you can see at the bottom of my original post that I would sub for all Google services, not search specifically.
All services that operate have to be funded in some way. Right now for Google services that it's done through collecting user data and selling it to advertisers.
I would prefer to pay a fee to fund those services I use if it meant my data was not collected and I was not served ads.
I personally find it more unhinged to think that everything online is somehow magically cost free to provide. Engineers have to code and deploy it, servers have to be purchased, electricity has to be generated, etc. If you have a service online that is "free", you need to ask where the money comes from to do all of those things. Chances are, it's from your data being sold and privacy reduced.
I might be the odd person out here, but if Google offered a premium sub service that did 0 data collection and I never got served a thing by ad sense, I'd pay for it.
My thought is that with data collection and advertising you become the product that is being sold. I'd rather buy a product than be a product.
EDIT: Not just search, but a sub for all Google products I use.
It may trigger a credit credit check if you click accept. If you don't need a lower APR because you pay it every month, the credit check only hurts your score.