Ask HN: Is G+ profitable for Google? - robschia
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skylark
Because Google has a magic fountain that shoots out a cubic foot of liquid
gold per second (ads), it can work on things which only tangentially benefit
the business.

Most Google products are operating at a loss.

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wirddin
Directly? Nope. Indirectly? I guess.

Google stores information about you to make the ads more relevant to you. If
someone is using/have used g+ and have liked a few profile/pages(not sure what
they're called) then google surely is more confident about this data than
other data, so it might help google drive more business by targeting better.

Again, as someone else pointed out, most of the google products are operating
at a loss only at individual product level. You can think of it as another
example for 80-20 Principle.

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slap_shot
Does Google+ even drive direct revenue for Google?

At quick glance, I don't see premium membership or display ads. I assume the
product operates at a loss but helps (read: tries to help) the ad products.

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dhogan
It might help them get some data. Data is the new money, right?

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remx
Data is the new oil, albeit unstructured data that is not machine readable and
can only live inside a Google data center.

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dafrankenstein2
I guess its about 80-20 principle..

