this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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internet funeral
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Being open to subscription fees to remove data collection and ads after Google's search engine became the trashiest, least useful search engine out there. https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/
I personally find a lot of Google's services valuable to use and like them. You may hate Google search, but you can see at the bottom of my original post that I would sub for all Google services, not search specifically.
All services that operate have to be funded in some way. Right now for Google services that it's done through collecting user data and selling it to advertisers.
I would prefer to pay a fee to fund those services I use if it meant my data was not collected and I was not served ads.
I personally find it more unhinged to think that everything online is somehow magically cost free to provide. Engineers have to code and deploy it, servers have to be purchased, electricity has to be generated, etc. If you have a service online that is "free", you need to ask where the money comes from to do all of those things. Chances are, it's from your data being sold and privacy reduced.
Maps is the only service they have that isn't bested by something else.
They're not making pennies on that data.
To pay vs letting them slurp up your data you'd be paying Alphabet thousands a year. It will never happen, but sure. It's a nice fantasy.
Your math doesn't make sense. In 2022 Google had $253B in annual ad revenue. Most estimates that I find have Google services users at 1 Billion+ on the low end. The Ad Revenue per User would be less than $25 a month.
That is an amount that I would pay for all the services I use. I already pay for YouTube premium which is more than half that cost.
It's not for everyone. There are many categories of people; those who couldn't afford a monthly fee, those that would rather get a free service for data collection and ads even if they could afford it, and those of us that would happily pay for services if the data collection and ads went away.
There is an argument that the services would be less valuable if data weren't collected to build the quality of results, like maps data and what not. I would argue that enough people would prefer to go the ad supported route to make that argument moot though.
More than half of their claimed user accounts are inactive. So many in fact that they're starting to auto-delete inactive accounts. The only way they'd agree to such an idea is if it were far, far more expensive.