Google’s whole business model revolves around collecting data from your habits then serving you targeted ads based on your data. Gmail is one of the free products Google offers. In Gmail, Google would scan your emails, anonymize the data, and then sell target ads against your inbox data. Scanning emails from consumers is a privacy concern, but scanning emails for a business could mean sensitive data being read or seen by competitors, even though the data is anonymised.
But now Google is changing course on how they monetize Gmail. According to one Google Exec, Daine Greene, Gmail is moving away from the anonymised scanning. Instead, Google will focus on the enterprise G Suite. While Google could stop scanning just G Suite inboxes they’re opting out of scanning all inboxes. Google won’t stop targeting users inboxes. They’ll still use your search history and other data they’ve collected on you to server target ads.
Google’s shifts their model to the world after search
Google see’s there is a future where their ad-supported model won’t work. Google Assistant is the first move towards that world. Google’s tried to mix ads in but they haven’t gone over well with consumers. Google’s moving towards subscriptions with YouTube Red, YouTube TV, G Suite, and other subscriptions. They’re looking for enterprise subscriptions to help offset a decline in ad revenue. While the ad decline is far off for Google proper, it’s already becoming a problem for YouTube and somewhat Adsense.
While the ad decline is far off for Google proper, it’s already becoming a problem for YouTube and somewhat Adsense. Advertisers realize they have no control where their ads are displayed whether it’s on an offensive video or a white nationalist news website. Google sees programmatic ads are becoming a problem and they’ll need subscriptions and businesses spending money to offset everything. Google is even working to build an ad blocker into Chrome, which would block ads that Google serves on websites. They’ll whitelist some of their own ad servers but they’ll still block a lot of ads.
This is a big business shift for Google. They’re moving to less of an ad-supported model and more of a subscription-backed model. Let me know what you think! Do you think Google will work hard to make ads less of a core part of their business model?
