That's naive. Nobody goes to Google because they want to see ads. They go to search, or to read their mail or to get a map somewhere, or dozens of other things. All of those services are the things that users value, and ads are the tool for monetizing valuable services. You can't separate it that cleanly.
83% of Google ad revenue is from ads on Google sites, and only 17% is from ads on someone else’s properties. If you also consider traffic acquisition costs, ads on someone else’s properties are very small part of Google profit.
Actually after search I went to ads as well to learn the maths part of it. Both are very interesting as long as you don't get to a team led by politics and PMs.
After politics/PMs creep in you have to stop looking at the data to improve the product because you get so many ,,little'' tasks to implement from the outside.
Ah, cool, yeah, sorry, actually I wrote the same thing in a sibling comment after you, that Google's product could easily be monetized without ads as well (just not as well). :)
>Nobody goes to Google because they want to see ads.
Sure. But ads are the reason how Google can support and pamper their workforce. It's what allowed them to bow to internal activists to give up on multi-billion dollar contracts with the Pentagon and maybe even other federal agencies (like ICE and CBP - though I'm not sure they would be crazy enough to do that).
