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0 pointsdylan6042y ago0 comments

It doesn't take that many <revenue generating> users to justify 12 engineers plus infra,

Otherwise, those 12 engineers and infra are pure negative on the balance sheet

0 comments

Having basically all their users (well, as much as for any of their revenue generating products anyway) be revenue generating would require practically no effort for google specifically. It fit their revenue model perfectly. It is trivial to put the exact same ads in there as they already had on search and gmail, and it is stickier than search or gmail.

pests2y ago

That would seem a little rude wouldn't it?

Taking content from another site, maybe that has ads, and then displaying it in Reader next to your own ads instead?

I think it would have caused some issues in the RSS world that such a big player was using everyone's content for themselves.

I used Reader daily back then. It's strange to think my current method of manually checking sites for updates was solved so long ago.

dylan604OP2y ago

LOL. the Googs worrying about being rude is charmingly funny in a webcomic kind of way. they removed their tag line of don't be evil. you think they are concerned about being rude?

however, this is precisely what Reddit was complaining about 3rd party apps doing to their content. everyone was trying to pivot to blaming AI scrappers, but that's just FUD.

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