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Comment by WinterMount223 | Hacker News Reader

If you can’t scale customer support then you can’t scale the customer base.

I'd guess that Google's support for their ad services are good enough? The problem here is that Play publishers are not really Google's customers.

Play Store publishers pay Google $25 for access to the Play Store, and then pay them 15% to 30% of all revenue collected via the apps.

Is that a lot from Google's perspective? If apps follow some power law distribution it might only be worth providing human support to a very limited number of them.

Customer support is provided for sub $20 items from e commerce sites who don't have Google's market cap. Not to mention that a customer support agent's time isn't exactly worth hundreds of dollars an hour.

It depends on how narrowly focused Google's strategy and commitment to reliable income is.

Linearly scaling up on human support agents doesn't look aligned with an AI driven strategy to enable income that is only coming from their advertising services.

From https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/020515/busin...

  Google Services generated $69.4 billion, or about 92% of total revenue, in Q4 FY 2021. Advertising revenue, at $61.2 billion, comprised 88% of the segment's revenue. The segment's revenue is up 31.3% compared to Q4 FY 2020. Google Services posted operating income of $26.0 billion, up 36.3% from the year-ago quarter.

  This figure surpassed Alphabet's total consolidated operating income of $21.9 billion due to operating losses in the other two segments as well as unallocated corporate costs. Google Services is thus the only segment that currently makes positive contributions to Alphabet's overall operating income

So Google Play can only exist in ways where it supports advertising. Sales are trivial in comparison. "Delighting" every app publisher is simply distracting.

Various sources indicate that Google play made >10 billion in revenue, much of that being profit: https://www.thurrott.com/mobile/android/254978/google-play-h...

These horror stories would mostly come from publishers that rely on the source of income, from whom the yearly Google play is likely to be at least a few thousands. There's no excuse to not involve a human in a decision as drastic as account termination.

Following to the original Reuters article

  The figures include sales of apps, in-app purchase and *app store ads*.

I would also prefer that Google have more tolerable support for publishers (and users), but it looks like those at the helm might be thinking it's irresponsible to see publishers as important customers. The publishers are not the ones providing the vast majority of the revenue - that seems to be advertiser.

The attention economy is addictive for those pushing it as well.

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