Companies pay Google with the money they got from you. They aren't getting "attention" they are getting future potential sales which will fund the next advertising round.
> I don't think Google would have ever gotten off the ground if you had to pay cash to search for stuff -- do you?
If online advertisement became illegal, Google or somebody else would have gotten off by selling search as a service.
I am not saying that this move would have made Google more successful, they are already successful. But I do not believe that this success is reaching us, consumers.
>Companies pay Google with the money they got from you
You talk as though this has already happened, but that's not the case. Companies pay Google with money they hope to recoup from you via your purchases, but whether or not you choose to buy the thing advertised is completely up to you. Advertising is an investment with uncertain returns, like any other.
>If online advertisement became illegal, Google or somebody else would have gotten off by selling search as a service.
It's possible, but I just don't think there's enough of an appetite to pay small amounts of cash for this. It will be interesting to see what happens with Kagi (though I acknowledge that if it fails, that would not be definitive, since it has to compete with ad-supported services, and massive, entrenched ones at that).
> You talk as though this has already happened, but that's not the case. Companies pay Google with money they hope to recoup from you via your purchases, but whether or not you choose to buy the thing advertised is completely up to you. Advertising is an investment with uncertain returns, like any other.
It has already happened. Things you buy have an online/google advertisement markup whether you use youtube premium or not. You pay for the ads no matter if you watch them or not.
Free services aren't actually free, on a large scale they affect how much everything should cost.
> It's possible, but I just don't think there's enough of an appetite to pay small amounts of cash for this. It will be interesting to see what happens with Kagi (though I acknowledge that if it fails, that would not be definitive, since it has to compete with ad-supported services, and massive, entrenched ones at that).
This is because free services are a trap. People do not want to pay for search BECAUSE there are """free""" alternatives. If every services become paid people wouldn't be as reluctant.
Free services also create wrong expectations and change the way we should use the service. Take youtube, it is free so everybody expect everyone to be able to access the platform, and so people tend to only upload to youtube because "why would you be anywhere else". And now, when youtube obviously change its term you have a wave an angry people seeing youtube as a platform that must remain convenient or their world will collapse.
If video platforms were all paid, people wouldn't have the same expectations. Uploaded videos could only target users who also paid for the platform, and would instinctively understand that this is a temporary platform.
> I don't think Google would have ever gotten off the ground if you had to pay cash to search for stuff -- do you?
If online advertisement became illegal, Google or somebody else would have gotten off by selling search as a service.
I am not saying that this move would have made Google more successful, they are already successful. But I do not believe that this success is reaching us, consumers.