Some weeks ago, I listen to the following Freakonomics podcast talking about Google:
Here, they explained how Google decided to use ads over other monetization strategies. At the end, it could be summarized in the following sentence:
MAYER: [...ads by user...] Google can make $500 a year on those same searchers with that same set of assumptions.
DUBNER: So in the end, it was not a hard decision.
MAYER: It wasn’t a hard decision.
Basically, Google Search earn $500 / year per user in ads. Or in other words: we pay a surcharge of $500 every year so google can tell us how to spend money instead of showing the results of the search at the top.
I guess that they think that more adds will be more money, but my experience is more adds, less activity. For example, we stopped watching public TV because of ads years ago. Recently, we have stopped watching YouTube because of the excess of ads. I have also stopped visiting some webpages and blogs because of the excess of ads. I stopped playing several games because of the excess of ads.
Ads are not worthy paying.
BTW: Mayer also jumps too quickly to conclusions for justifying ads, for example, when talking about the results of ads vs no-ads:
"What we saw was 3 percent more searches from people who had ads than didn’t […] which I thought was really validating",
They assumed that more searches = more satisfaction, which could be the opposite: more searches = poorer results and more refinement needed. On those days, we wanted to have the exact result on top, and we kept adding keywords until we had it. ¿An early form of prompt engineering?
