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Comment by Dwolb | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have insight into Google's strategy on all these subscription services?

Is it to legitimize previous tech endeavors to make sure they're sustainable in the long term? Does Google forecast subscription services will make up a sizable portion of revenue in the future? Is the experience better at Google than anywhere else due to the vast amount of data and new technology being created everyday?

I'm not sure I totally get it yet because the revenue Google stands to capture in these markets feels incremental compared to their main advertising and marketing businesses.

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With ad revenues drying up (Adblock, general lack to interest to ads) Google is forced to look at other avenues to make money and selling stuff to people is a great way for that.

> With ad revenues drying up

Haven't their revenues been going up despite the CPC going down?

For sure that can be the case. But what does this mean then for the entire suite of Google services?

Their entire strategy up until these new paid-for services predicated on giving people free services (Gmail, Docs, search) under the assumption they could pay for the development and support with ads.

It seems like they're shifting to a model seen by open source software creators - free to use, but any extra features or support will cost extra.

1B YouTube users times 10% subscribe times $10/mo.

Note, 1B users today in 2015. Still growing at 40% according to their stats page. Pretty decent math.

I think it's a decent argument to say there is substantial revenue to be gained.

But by claiming Google will hit 100M users paying $10 per month seems lofty unless there's something really unique about an ad free Youtube experience. Netflix has under 40M subscribers paying ~$8 per month right now.

Youtube has really cranked up the ads to the point that this becomes an attractive proposition.

Adblockers are still effective against this.

> unless there's something really unique about an ad free Youtube experience

There is: Google Music is bundled with it. That was enough to switch me over to it after 3+ years as a Spotify Premium subscriber.

For me, the YouTube benefits are an excellent cherry on top of a service I was already paying for before.

> But by claiming Google will hit 100M users paying $10 per month seems lofty unless there's something really unique about an ad free Youtube experience. Netflix has under 40M subscribers paying ~$8 per month right now.

Netflix doesn't bundle something equivalent to Google Play Music All Access with their streaming video service, and doesn't have an free, advertising-support tier with a billion users as an onramp to the paid service.

Also, Youtube has a different model for acquiring content, and a greater diversity in kinds of content. Which might give it a broader natural market than Netflix has.

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