I would like to know how much David pays Google to use their service? Depends which customer hat you're wearing, no? To search I make a bargain with Google wh

I would like to know how much David pays Google to use their service? Depends which customer hat you're wearing, no? To search I make a bargain with Google whereby I use their search service and they present me with (hopefully) contextual advertising. To reach other people who have made the same bargain above, I make a bargain whereby I (or more correctly we, the corporate entity) pay Google a chunk of change each year. This arrangement works because in each case I get something of a higher value than the price paid, and Google gets paid more than the cost incurred to provide it. 37Signals works much the same, as do most businesses. Despite having burned through a significant amount of cash, it appears, although without the visibility of a public company it's hard to really know, that neither Ning nor Facebook have found an effective way to make such an arrangement. Whether this is or isn't a problem really depends the appetite for risk of their investors.