Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) has been no stranger to dabbling in various niches and creating new products that at times raise eyebrows and even skepticism. The tech giant has a clear focus behind each product launch, though, as was discussed on Bloomberg West yesterday, and that is to build firstly a product that many people will love, and worry about monetization later.
“[…] I think part of what’s interesting about Google’s business is that you really can’t make an interesting business unless you have scale; unless you have a product that people use, because you’re monetizing at pennies per ad click here and there, and so the focus was really always on the getting a product that lots of people loved, and lots of people used, because until you got there, there really wasn’t a business to be made,” said former Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) employee and current Shadow Puppet CEO Carl Sjogreen.
As former Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Europe COO and current Adknowledge CEO Ben Legg explained, the goal for Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) was then to begin putting a strategy in place for monetizing the service. While in rare cases that could involve subscriptions, in most cases the services were free, and were monetized through selling ads.
“[…] Once you’ve got a decent audience, then say, “how do you make money?”. So the first goal was really to be a world class product, push it fast, iterate fast, and then to say, “this is a free product, therefore it’s ok to serve some ads, what’s the right type of ad”, occasionally it would be subscription-based, normally ad-based, and start small and test off how do you get the right ad to the right consumer at the right time. Does it hurt the consumer experience, yes or no, and then sort of ramp up slowly once we sort of worked out the right ad unit, the right model, etc.,” Legg said.
Legg also briefly touched on Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL)’s unheralded international success, which accounts for as much as half of their revenue, and allows them to invest more money into research and development of new products, while still boasting large profits.
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