Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Closi 1390 days ago
> Being such succesful products, all of these taken together probably generate sufficient income to cover Google's Ad business...

Assuming this post is sarcasm, Are we really going to criticise Google Search for not being profitable?

Google has an ad business because of these products, not seperate to them.

2 comments

Google doesn't have an ad-business, it is an ad-business.

You can't separate Google from its ad business. All of their major products exist in service of the ad business, search, inbox, even Chrome. If the services don't exist to help build a profile of you, they exist to help build a profile of web traffic and detect ad-fraud, or to simply shape the landscape into one that isn't hostile to google's ads.

I'd say that Google has these products (really, services) because of its ad business, not the other way round.

Someone more familiar with Google's oeuvre can probably answer this: all those well-liked services that Google unceremoniously cancelled — were they the ones that didn't help (or harmed) Google's ad business?