

Will Google Fonts Ever Be Shut Down? - thefutureisfake
http://www.typewolf.com/blog/will-google-fonts-ever-be-shut-down

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takeda
The reason is only one. Having a website use Google service requested on
random pages gives Google ability to get insight what pages users are
visiting.

This goes together with other things Google provides for "free" such as jQuery
and other interesting libraries.

The author don't seem to understand it, based on him comparing it to Google
Reader and quickly dismissing it is not the data. They don't care about
tracking page owner, they want to track the page users.

By providing a service that majority of websites use and that is essential for
the page to work makes much harder to block through adblock, ghostery and
friends.

This basically gives them an edge over any other competitors, whose only
option to gather similar data is to make users install their toolbars.

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hackuser
I wonder what percentage of pages, and of page views, ping Google? Does anyone
have data?

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takeda
I would imagine it is huge, there are even templates and frameworks that
utilize their services.

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gdulli
Google wants a pixel on as many pages on the internet as possible. Some pages
will never try to show ads and don't care about analytics. Google wants to
keep those pages from being dark to them so they use other ways to incentivize
publishers to pixel their users.

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desdiv
>It can’t be cheap to serve fonts on this kind of scale. To date there have
been over 2.6 trillion pageviews using Google Fonts. Sure, the fonts are
oftentimes cached in the user’s browser but that is still a lot of requests
and a lot of data being transferred. A trillion is a big number, even for a
company like Google.

I randomly picked 10 font families and downloaded them, and the files were
11.8MB in total after unzipping. At approximately 1.2MB per pageview, 2.6
trillion pageviews is _only_ around 3 exabytes. That's _only_ $100k in
bandwidth costs at your average CDN. I'm sure Google's infrastructure costs
are even lower than that.

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kentbrew
Of course it will. Right after you build something that depends on it.

