Google offers many of its services for free, including Google Search, Google Mail, and Youtube that are used by pretty much everyone on the planet, so you may be wondering how does Google make money if all it makes are free products?
Google makes its money mainly through advertising: through third-party online ads that show next to content on their webpages. There are several Google products name similarly: Google Ads, Google AdSense, Google AdWords, Google AdMob. You get the idea.
While we sell things like Pixel phones, apps on the Play Store, YouTube subscriptions, and tools for businesses, we make the vast majority of our money from advertising.
https://about.google/how-our-business-works/ (accessed 2024-03-31).
If you have ever seen an ad in a webpage before, it most likely comes from Google.
Essentially, websites that want revenue whether to pay for hosting costs or to make a profit put "ad space" on their webpages, while Google acts as a middle man between these website owners (the "publishers") and businesses with products they want to advertise online (the "advertisers"). The ads of the advertisers fill the "ad spaces" and when they do the website makes money. Google's job is to make sure the right ads go to the right spaces. Ads about games, for example, are more likely to show up in game-related webpages, but Google also has other ways to make ads more relevant.
In order to get a free e-mail address, i.e. use Google Mail, or comment on videos on Youtube, you need a Google Account. Google records your behavior across online Google products in your Google Account and builds a profile of you to show you the ads that Google thinks are going to make them the most money. Some of these ads appear when you search on Google, others appear when you read your e-mail. Some of this information may also used to decide which results appear to you when you search for something, or which videos are recommended to you on Youtube.
As the Internet adage says: "If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold."
There are free alternatives to Google products that don't track and create profiles out of your behavior and paid alternatives that don't show ads at all (in which you are the customer). For Google Search, these would be DuckDuckGo and Kagi, respectively. These alternatives work in similar but different ways to Google, so knowing how to use Google helps you know how to use them as well.
Leave a Reply