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Comment by charcircuit | Hacker News Reader

Advertising is a monetization modal. That's like saying that resteraunts are just credit card swiping businesses.

Chrome is similar to other apps like X, Instagram, or YouTube. You click on the app. You are given a way to discover content and ads are shown along side that content. When you click on a site / post there can also be ads. Maximizing engagement on the web, means people will discover more content, which means more ads can be displayed.

>AMP

Unlike the other platforms I mentioned the web hosts content using 3rd party tech stacks and server which means that the user experience can be variable. AMP allows Google to provide a more consistent experience. It was optional and served to provide a better user experience for the users of the web.

>Ad-blocking prohibition

Google Search and Chrome have not prohibited ad blockers.

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Advertising accounts for 80% of AlphaGoogle's revenue. That makes them Google's monarchy.

Re: AMP. AMP is like Cloudflare. Whatever is good about it is, by definition, bad for the Web, because its model replaces the Web as-we-know-it with something closer to Compuserve.

Re: Ad-blockers. It may not be a complete prohibition, but it is a hobbling of ad-blockers. It is clearly intentional, too, as evidenced by AlphaGoogle's recent anti-adblocker initiatives at Youtube.

>its model replaces the Web as-we-know-it with something closer to Compuserve.

Companies providing web hosting is already an established part of the web for a long time. People want to dedicate their time to the problems the site has and not to the problems the infra has. Not every site is going to want to setup their own servers at hundreds of points of presence around the world. Being able to use someone else's for free allows site operators to improve the user experience of their site for users for free. Even if such a deal ends people can still connect and use the original site directly.

> That's like saying that resteraunts are just credit card swiping businesses.

You are being sarcastic here, but ironically you are not far from the truth. The core financial model of a businesses is not always obvious.

McDonald’s is a real-estate business. Costco is a subscription business.

I'm not being sarcastic. I'm providing an example of the reductionist thinking going on. Companies can about multiple things. McDonalds still cares about getting people to eat at their resteraunt.

> Costco is a subscription business.

I don’t think that’s accurate. The membership fee is a trivially small percentage for most members, and can’t be a significant margin driver. Especially for those members who have a pack of kids and shop Costco regularly, spending hundreds of dollars per visit.

I personally think the membership fee exists as a gating function to keep less-prolific customers out of overcrowded stores on weekends.

Costco prices are very low. They intentionally make very little margin on what people buy.

Their margin comes from subscriptions.

>Advertising is a monetization modal. That's like saying that resteraunts are just credit card swiping businesses.

Ads aren't the mechanism through which Google receives payment, they're what Google is paid for. The actual claim your analogy matches is that Google is just an online credit card processing business. But nobody makes that claim.

It 100% wasn't an 'option' if you wanted traffic as a publisher for a solid period of time

The search algorithm didn't rank AMP sites higher for being AMP. It was optional.

Maybe not. But the search page did hijack links to show a google-managed copy pre-AMP.

Chrome does prohibit ad blockers on mobile.

The mobile build of chromium does not support extentions and Chrome doesn't have an adblocker built in. Not doing the work of adding support for extentions is not the same as prohibiting ad blockers extentions on mobile. The Chromium team at Google does accept CRs for making it easier for extention support to be added and there are a few chromium forks that have extentions on mobile builds.

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