4 ms·

I’m a big fan of looking at annual reports to understand a company. Google is not subtle about where its priorities lie. There is a section in their 10-K title

I’m a big fan of looking at annual reports to understand a company. Google is not subtle about where its priorities lie. There is a section in their 10-K titled “How we make money” and the two sub-bullets are “Performance advertising” and “Brand advertising”. The rest is a footnote. Their revenue breakdown tells a similar story. Google as a whole had revenues of $161B in 2019, and $134B of that was direct revenue from from ad sales. “Other bets” (inclusive of consumer product things like Fiber, Fi, etc) is less than $1B — a rounding error in the scope of their overall business. I know it’s flippant to say “you’re not the customer, you’re the product” but it’s particularly true in the case of Google. They are a B2B advertising company, not a B2C products company. It’s just not part of their business model to provide support to anyone who isn’t an ad buyer. It honestly ends up thwarting their ambitions in the product space because the kind of customer support required to succeed just isn’t in their DNA.

RandomTisk 6y ago
Does this mean that Google is basically using all their services like Stadia or Fiber to keep people's minds aware of their presence, essentially using these services as their own advertisement outreach while hoping they also return a profit on their own advertisement?
- zaksoup 6y ago
  Or as other vectors for advertising. Stadia store sells ad space to game companies. Google Home is a speaker capable of playing ads (or more subtly giving paid-for answers to questions) etc.
  - donkeyd 6y ago
    Yup, it's amazing, the number of places they can sell ad space, or use to collect data to improve targeting. The games you play and the platforms you play them on will definitely help fine tune ad targeting. It's just Google clawing deeper into your personal life. And I hate to admit, they're doing great. I recently tried some different search engines (DDG among others) and they just never give me results as accurate as Google does.
- nikanj 6y ago
  They're also a recruitment tool. It's much easier to convince people to join Google with the promise of working on cool new tech, instead of just micro-hyper-optimizing endless facets of ad placement.
- wayoutthere 6y ago
  They're using those services to "grab eyeballs" and collect data for advertising. You don't need a ton of users to get enough data about a market via sampling. Stadia is pretty new but I don't see it sticking around for the long haul. Amazon (Twitch) and Microsoft are in a much better position in that market. Fiber has been effectively cancelled; Google has been shopping it around to various telecoms since 2017 but because it's an overlay network and it's not very large, nobody wants the headache of trying to integrate it. Fiber was always an attempt to push broadband providers to update their networks to better support YouTube; Google was never going to throw down the $100B that it would have taken to be competitive. It was never designed for long-term viability because it didn't need to be to serve its purpose.

RandomTisk 6y ago

Does this mean that Google is basically using all their services like Stadia or Fiber to keep people's minds aware of their presence, essentially using these services as their own advertisement outreach while hoping they also return a profit on their own advertisement?

zaksoup 6y ago
Or as other vectors for advertising. Stadia store sells ad space to game companies. Google Home is a speaker capable of playing ads (or more subtly giving paid-for answers to questions) etc.
- donkeyd 6y ago
  Yup, it's amazing, the number of places they can sell ad space, or use to collect data to improve targeting. The games you play and the platforms you play them on will definitely help fine tune ad targeting. It's just Google clawing deeper into your personal life. And I hate to admit, they're doing great. I recently tried some different search engines (DDG among others) and they just never give me results as accurate as Google does.
nikanj 6y ago
They're also a recruitment tool. It's much easier to convince people to join Google with the promise of working on cool new tech, instead of just micro-hyper-optimizing endless facets of ad placement.
wayoutthere 6y ago
They're using those services to "grab eyeballs" and collect data for advertising. You don't need a ton of users to get enough data about a market via sampling. Stadia is pretty new but I don't see it sticking around for the long haul. Amazon (Twitch) and Microsoft are in a much better position in that market. Fiber has been effectively cancelled; Google has been shopping it around to various telecoms since 2017 but because it's an overlay network and it's not very large, nobody wants the headache of trying to integrate it. Fiber was always an attempt to push broadband providers to update their networks to better support YouTube; Google was never going to throw down the $100B that it would have taken to be competitive. It was never designed for long-term viability because it didn't need to be to serve its purpose.