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Comment by conradk | Hacker News Reader

That's amazing. Google has taken over the web with ads. And now that everybody hates ads, it's suggesting you remove those ads with another Google product. It doesn't get any smarter than that.

(this is not sarcasm, I actually think this is amazing in terms of strategy)

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Yeah, not only that but it's not easy for an org as big as Google to experiment with stuff like this when they have a huge advertising operation that's trying to sell more ads, not less. Moves like this have to be top down driven by a strong leader.

Doesn't matter money wise. Google will make its buck anyway. They confess that only part will go to the content owner. So business/strategy perspective, not much different for regular google ops. Transaction by user, rather than advertiser, is the only difference.

> And now that everybody hates ads, it's suggesting you remove those ads with another Google product. It doesn't get any smarter than that.

...but how will they grow revenue in ~5 years when everyone has paid to remove ads?

Won't they put themselves out of business because if nobody is looking at ads, nobody will be paying for ads, so then there won't be any ads to display, and everyone will stop paying to not see ads.

(genuine question)

I don't think this will happen. Most people will probably cope with ads. So Google will keep making business that way.

But the ones that don't want to see ads may pay Google instead of using AdBlock. Also, some publishers may decide to use Google's solution instead of an in-house one, which allows Google not to be bypassed.

If all that was to fail, I'm sure Google will find new problems to solve and more ways to grow revenue.

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