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Looking at calculated stats from 2016 which admittedly are out of date showed an ARPU of $6.70 a quarter.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.

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.

https://vim-adventures.com/