this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2025
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I guess the cost is worth it to Google just to entrench themselves and their products even further into the lives of most people.
Yeah it's part of their overall strategy to be seen as a core part of the internet / the web. Same as Yahoo in the 90s and early 2000s.
The more people that use their free services, the more appealing they are to advertisers compared to competing ad platforms (broader reach), and the more paid subscribers they get.
Products like Visual Studio, some Jetbrains IDEs, VMware ESXi, and a lot of SaaS products, are (or used to be) free for individuals or for open source usage for a similar reason - people get familiar with them at home, and end up recommending them and buying them at work. A few individuals liking the product can result in large companies signing paid contracts for tens of thousands of users.
And it would give a competitor a foothold to build a competing ad business