[HerraBRE]

It's still a means to an end. You don't pay with your data, you "pay" by interacting with ads.

Consider that Google actually became super profitable well before all the detailed tracking started. You grossly underestimate the synergy of "people searching for products" and "displaying ads". Everything else is an optimization.

You're describing Facebook... which is no where near as profitable as Google, in spite of much more invasive tracking.

If you never click an ad and use an adblocker so you never even see them, your traffic and your data just cost Google money. They may be able to extract some small amount of value by observing your behaviour and using those insights to improve their products, but they don't make any money until someone pays for an ad.

I agree the café analogy isn't perfect. I was just pointing out that outsiders who don't understand what's going on may fundamentally misunderstand the transaction. You can still provide value to the café by sitting in their chairs if you liven up the place and give them feedback on how to make the place nicer.

But if customers never buy anything, the café goes broke. And people stop interacting with ads on Google, Google does too.

[sweden]

You are wrong that by stating that if we don't click on ads or use adblockers we are costing money to Google.

Even if you don't use the ads or if simply ignore them, you still represent a group of interests that can be used to feed and train the machine.

Google learns through the searches you make and through the videos you watch and your behaviour will be used to improve the accuracy of ads shown to other people. That's your payment for using Google's services.

The only reason people stop interacting with ads it's because ads don't bring any real value, And any data that Google might collect brings up that value a lot.

I think you underestimate a lot of the number of people unaware of Google's presence and influence when it comes to advertisement. This number is much bigger than the number of people who install adblock on their browser.

[HerraBRE]

Neither of us knows this, so we may as well stop arguing about it. What we do know, is that running the servers and hiring all those engineers costs money, and their revenue is almost entirely ads.

I don't think it's a stretch to assert that users that engage with and click on ads are much more valuable to Google than users that don't.

Whether the users that do neither contribute positively or negatively to the bottom line is an interesting question. I suspect they're a net negative, but obviously you disagree.

Google themselves probably know the answer, but I doubt they're telling...

Aside: a supporting data-point for my gut feeling here is that AdSense has always contributed much, much less to Google's revenue than AdWords does. The difference between the two gives a clear indication of how capturing user intent (searching for products) completely dominates how valuable (=effective) the ads are, and is much more important than all the other tracking combined. Google could probably turn off all the tracking and still make tons of money. Some numbers are here: http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/020515/busine...

[MarHoff]

Also you can't adblock paid top ranked search result so even if you don't click, and even if you know it's an ad, you've seen the brand in the top result, and the brand pay Google for that.