Does Google Maps Make Money? ⇥ placing.technology

Ingrid Burrington:

So even though there isn’t really a smoking gun here, I think it’s worth playing out what Google Geo being break-even or not-especially profitable means for both Google and for geospatial technology as a sector. Google Maps really warped public perception of the business of geospatial by making what had previously been consumer products totally free to consumers. Why do that — why undercut a revenue source — in order to maintain other revenue sources that aren’t necessarily profitable or certainly not hundreds of billions of dollars profitable?

Burrington’s attempts to answer this question reinforce how much of Google is unsustainable if it were fractured into standalone businesss. Maps, Docs, YouTube, Gemini — it seems unlikely any of these work on their own without the backing of Google’s monopolistic digital advertising business. That is, not just any digital ads, but specifically the vast control Google has over online advertising is, seemingly, what props up products that would otherwise struggle to remain afloat as they grew.