Good for them (and I say this as someone who was actually in Google Maps, both in monetization and in regular development). Maps has been losing money for lite

Good for them (and I say this as someone who was actually in Google Maps, both in monetization and in regular development). Maps has been losing money for literally decades. I don't know if they've finally turned that around or not. In some parts of the world, they were still paying a 3rd party per lookup because they didn't own the data. I also don't know the numbers for their API charges, but I wouldn't be surprised if the totals are mostly symbolic, for VP's to defend themselves as "Hey, look, we're getting all we can out of it!"