* one does not need $200-300B ARR to run a search engine; and merely making a ton of money does not mean that the way that one has been making that money will continue forever
* using Kagi, one realizes how much the web has been perverted, in my opinion, by the obsession with the ad model; there are many nice, novel things that Kagi could introduce which would reduce ad revenue for a company like Google, but would be useful and novel for Kagi without loss in revenue (on the contrary — could help); ie google is incentivized to keep people on the site through various irritating means; a search engine that isn’t distracting and gives me what I want — I would be more than glad to pay for (and already do pay Kagi $10/month)
Other thoughts:
* Supposing $10/month (honestly I would consider $20) with 100M paying users; that is $1B MRR which is not bad at all and is more than plenty for a meaningfully sized team with meaningful salaries.
* Just like how lowered energy prices during and after the Industrial Revolution made manufacturing at scale feasible, the incredible amount of high quality OSS and infrastructure these days is making it increasingly feasible to do things Google did 20 years ago — something unthinkable for even the best engineers of that era. Not to mention the relative ease of collecting capital with payment services (let alone VCs, etc.) today — even with a looming recession factored in.
That would actually be $12B ARR, since that price is per month while ARR is usually per year.
US attention is the most valuable because it is the richest large nation and the largest rich nation.
European attention comes a distant second. Together they have 40% of the global GDP, but likely something like 60-70% of the consumption of non-essential goods in nominal terms. Accordingly, average advertiser cost per clock differs ~10x between the cheapest and most expensive groups of countries.
35 dollar is maybe ok… …. Maybe better than spending 3500$ on … I dont know … stuff is good also ..
In a sense, that model is better at distributing income, because everyone gets a service and the people who can afford pay for everything. If everything was behind paywalls, people who can afford would have all the nice services and people who can't, will have nothing.
What's interesting is that "targeted ads" is a bit of a misnomer. It's more of an ads ranking, where the user is shown the ads they are most likely to buy. However, from the point of view of the car dealership, when they think targeted ads, they would like their ads to be shown only to people who will likely buy the car. No company would want their ads shown to someone with no disposable income, yet, they will be shown some ad.
They have a full business suite, App Store, hardware sales, fiber internet, wireless cell and internet, and a server rental division.
Yep, but the main problem here is the perverse pressure to grow indefinitely.
And that comes from it being acceptable for public companies to pay no dividends and instead rely on share price increases to deliver a return on investment.
Something that slows down this growth spiral would fix things partially. Require profitable companies to pay a % of the profit as dividends to their shareholders?