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Comment by pavs | Hacker News Reader

I understand what you are saying.

But the issue is not so black or white. Google/Alphabet is not pouring billions of dollars on free products from the goodness of their heart, they are doing so increase their revenue from ADs. As matter of fact, I would think that most of their ad revenue does not come from direct ad products, but indirectly from other products.

Whether ads are ok or not is a different argument (I don't have any problems with Ads as long as they are not too annoying), but the feeling of righteousness is something I can't understand.

Please understand Google is a for-profit public-traded company, with the only objective of making money for their shareholders (nothing wrong with that), but to imply they have all these free products without any hidden revenue agenda (is, mostly Ads), is just ridiculous.

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I don't think @CydeWeis was dismissing the revenue motivation, but rather stating that the engineering resources themselves are being poured into other innovative products that users love, not just into AdTech, even if these products are primarily motivated by ad revenue for Google, the company. Individual engineers, like Jeff Dean, may also have different motivations than the publicly traded company for doing the work they do. It's likely the engineers working on Maps, etc. and the underlying tech would not see their work as simply "AdTech."

It's absolutely very likely that individual, well-respected developers, and engineers are working on cool things in the company that directly has nothing to do with ads. I have nothing against those individuals or those products or even google for that matter.

But the business model is much more complicated than that.

Their product is their vessel for ad money, you can't mention one without talking about the other.

So when someone says: > vast majority of Google's products that aren't ads, like Search, Maps, Android, Gmail.

It's a very simplistic view of how Google business model works. Because AFAIK, only 3 Google products are directly ads related, but ~90% of their other products exist for the sole purpose of driving business to their ads products.

ie, Machine learning in adsense: https://adsense.googleblog.com/2018/02/introducing-adsense-a...

> but ~90% of their other products exist for the sole purpose of driving business to their ads products.

This is flatly false. While certainly, many of the products are used in ads, yes, very few products exist for the sole purpose of driving ads business. A few examples of things that don't: Drive, Docs, Gmail (GSuite/B2B), GCE (B2B again), ML, TF, etc. (again, B2B offerings, as well as being used for all sorts of internal things that have nothing to do with ads), Youtube (Red, TV), etc.

While many things certainly drive ads revenue, there are very few things that you could argue exist solely, or even mostly, to drive ads revenue.

(Am Googler)

But I never said 100% of Google products exist to drive revenue to Ads, I said most do, ie, most free products.

We are not talking about B2B or B2C products for obvious reasons.

Outside of B2B and B2C offering (ie, Gsuite and Youtube RED), both youtube and Gmail makes money from ads. Docs is part of the Drive and Drive with Gmail share same free space limit. Drive is free tier to their B2C offering (pay money for more space). Just like Dropbox has a free tier. Docs is a feature of a drive - which they needed to compete with other similar services.

TF is used as a paid service (along with TPU) for their GCE, also TF is a great marketing tool to hire top-notch machine learning enthusiast to their company. Nothing wrong with that.

According to this (not sure how accurate this is): https://www.statista.com/statistics/266471/distribution-of-g...

Google still accounts close to ~90 of their revenue from ads. The good news is that it looks like their diversification plan is working.

I have nothing against Google or their employees, I think it's an awesome company, I would rather live in a world where Google exists. Regardless of their profit motive, it would be hard to ignore their contribution to make the internet a better place.

But "100% of Google products exist to drive revenue to ads" would probably have been more correct than what you originally said, which was

>but ~90% of their other products exist for the sole purpose of driving business to their ads products.

Machine learning at Google, for example, is a product that exists to, among other things, drive revenue to ads. It is not however a product that exists solely to drive revenue to ads.

As soon as you say "we are not talking about B2B or B2C products", you've made a tautological argument. What you're saying is that "all of the Google products which don't make money via other methods make money via ads". Which is trivially true, but also totally uninteresting.

My point was that the original statement you made was a hyperbole: there are not very many Google products which exist, as you stated, "for the sole purpose of driving business to [ads]". Most Google products have other revenue generation methods. That's all.

One thing which I have adored about Google is X labs ( now part of Alphabet.) very few people are like Larry,Sergey who have the audacity to diversify. They are highly scientific-minded, I see Google/Alphabet both as a tech co and a research , experimentation co. That's what differentiates them from others. Sure, when they fail their success% goes down, but the knowledge acquired by scientific community goes up as a lot of Googlers go on to start their own cos.

I'm not talking about the business model. I'm talking about the products themselves. We're talking past each other if you can't understand that. The majority of the engineering effort at Google goes into features on the products themselves, unrelated to ads. We're talking about the contributions of individual Google engineers, not the business model of the company as a whole. This isn't "overly simplistic".

It's likely the engineers working on Maps, etc. and the underlying tech would not see their work as simply "AdTech."

What’s that Upton Sinclair quote?

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