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How? Where is that money coming from.
Your personal data and your attention (advertisements). Those two things are the cornerstone of how big tech makes their money
I thought most ads are pay per click. We have to train people not to click on ads.
We actually learned that when I grew up. Don't click on random stuff the internet shows you. Click on what you are looking for, not what is shown to you, it might be a virus.
I have spent zero dollars on things that were advertised to me.
Google doesn't care if you spend money on what is advertised to you. They get paid just for showing you the advert.
That doesn’t matter. It costs money for companies to place adds with Google. That money goes directly to them regardless of whether or not you make a purchase. They then make use of their vast data resources to target people with said ads, which may not affect you, but definitely pushes products (some business people have described a 3x on investment with Google and Facebook ads).
Because Google ads are on nearly every website, and because Google owns such a large bevy of services including search, YouTube, Gmail, and maps, they can collect all of this data into a scarily accurate profile of your behavior, interests, and beliefs. Data that is shared with their partners and ends up all over the internet.
It's an average. Some people are going to bring it down, some people bring it up. I take a certain pride in doing my best to bring it down, but at the end of the day living in a capitalist hellscape, you have to concede it's going to get you at least a little.
Because it's not just clicking on sponsored Google links. You may never directly buy something sponsored, but by giving them your data, you give them demographic information to find people like you that might be more prone to clicking links, and that helps.
Exactly, and even if you bought a few, who the fuck is spending even close to that much a year. Advertisers would also have costs to the products they sell beyond just the marketing budget.
You seem to be misunderstanding the entire premise, I just can't tell if you're doing it on purpose or not. They don't make money from your purchases. To oversimplify everything, they make money when a company pays them to show you an ad. They also make money by watching everything you do and building a profile about you that they then sell to the companies so they can pay Google to show you ads that they think might tempt you the most. There are very complicated metrics running behind the screen that determines how likely the purchases you have made were affected by ads shown to you, whether you clicked on the ads or not. You might think you haven't been affected by ads or made Google $16,000 because you didn't spend $16,000, but that's not how they make money from you.
I know, but if that much money has been spent it is at a huge loss to who ever is spending it
Advertisers, presumably.
So here's the deal: you pay me out and in return you'll stop tracking me.
They'll su they won't track you. But offer you the entire suite, almost as if they want you in their ecosystem, while also lying about being non profit
My point: dig deeper
That's why Pichai tries to kill off anything that threatens its bottom line, such as ending Manifest V2 support for Chrome addons like uBlock Origin.
If they want to pay me half I'll turn ads back on.
What is the color code on that page supposed to convey?
I just clicked on "browsers" and found no explanation nor pattern on the color code.
And no: I won't search for it, this is critique with a question mark not genuine need for answer.
Oh, I'm worth a hell of a lot more than that to them
Great website, thanks; I've never seen such a thorough email page before.
I could use that money back
That's bull.
this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2026
259 points (100.0% liked)
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