Should Google Charge For Services?
In March 2006, Danny Sullivan wrote a post titled 25 Things I Hate About Google. Are his criticisms still valid today?
Two criticisms, I believe, are very apt for today. First,
16. Stop giving away Blogger for free. It’s just full of junk. Junk, junk, junk. If you let anyone have it with no barriers, surprise, some are going to take it and do bad things with it.
and secondly,
23. Charge for things! Seriously, I’m getting frightened. I love that anyone can get free analytics, email, you name it from you. But I’m fearful that people also can’t get support for when things go wrong. Meanwhile, I worry that companies I want competing with you, to keep you on your toes, can’t do so when you use advertising to underwrite everything. It just feels anti-competitive.
On the first point, Blogger is full of spam. I don’t know what percentage of Blogger blogs are spam blogs, but I’m sure the percentage is pretty high. Even today, after Google went on a splog delete spree about a year ago. It’s too easy for spammers to open up a spam blog and let it sit so they can use it periodically to steal content and build links to crap sites. Even if Google charged $1 for Blogger blogs it would serve as a deterrent to spammers, who tend to be too cheap to afford $1 for anything.
On charging for Google Analytics, I’m not sure. I like that it is free. On the other hand, Danny’s point that it appears to be anti-competitive is a good one. I mean, there are several other analytics programs out there that are every bit as good as Google Analytics and you have to pay for them. If users had to pay for GA then those other programs might look more attractive, which is why Google doesn’t charge for Analytics. Still, by charging for analytics, Google could earn revenue from that product and re-invest that revenue into product improvement. In fact, Google could do that with a lot of things.
What do you think? Should Google charge for its products and services?
4 Responses to “Should Google Charge For Services?”
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if the email i got this morning about the issues Google products have had.
Google has had serious issues in many Northeast geographies (Updated: Affecting people in a minimum of Atlanta, NYC, DC, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, & Philadelphia).
Update: Between 8:12 – 8:26 AM EST Google seemed to have brought most of their properties back online except for Google Wave. Wonder if Wave was the breaking point (and might explain why invitations being sent are not ending up in inboxes). It’s not just Google, it’s also Google properties. Every site that:
* Displays AdSense
* Uses Google Checkout
* Display Doubleclick ads
* Uses Google Analytics
Having to rely on discussion boards and forums is not a perfect solution for corporates, you need that level of support for some of their products.
Hi David,
Thanks for sharing that email that you received from Google. I agree sometimes a simple phone tech support would be very helpful. If Google charged a fee for some of its services and improved support, then this would help them gain more market share in certain areas…
For instance, our company email hosting company is not the best, I would love to move our email over to Google custom email (I think is $50 a year) but because there is no phone support I will not move it over…
The thing I love about Google is they have helped reduce the barrier to entry for small & growing business. Tools like Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools provide valuable insight to businesses just getting off the ground (and in this economy, helpful savings). Clearly these free services are bait to elicit engagment in AdWords/AdSense and drive Google fans to their search.. all good for Google and if the results are good for advertisers(which they are more often than not) then it seems like a fair trade.
Seeing that their free tools do require a little handholding from time to time, I do think it might be worthwhile to charge a nominal fee for support. Even I could use that sometimes and would gladly pay to have a Google Pro on the line.
Hi JimG,
Great points and thanks for stopping by!