nothing in this world is free everything has a price but for years now big tech companies have been trying to refute this principle by offering free services to the masses now of course these reputations are only surface level at best because instead of taking your money to provide you with the service they take your data and sell it to make a profit or in some cases use it to generate targeted ads for their ad Networks but lately these profits haven't been as high as they used to be maybe it's because investors are more interested in
AI companies these days perhaps it's because more people are using ad blockers and browsers like Brave which results in these companies having less of your data to sell especially if you're able to use these tools to block The Trackers in their websites and other free services that are specifically designed to gather data from you as you're using the service and I would also imagine that if you aren't seeing any ads in the first place that affects the market price that Google meta or whatever ad company is able to sell the ads for in the first
place directly affecting their bottom line whatever the reason is for these profits being weighed down tech companies are starting to implement cost saving measures that are affecting the end users of these free services one of Google's first products besides their search engine of course was Gmail it was a huge hit back in 2004 when it first launched because for one free email Services were not as common 20 years ago as they are now but the big kick with Gmail is you got one whole gigabyte of free storage in your mailbox which Google actually doubled the
year after well all of the competing mail services would only give you maybe a few dozen megabytes of free storage at best and it was easy to create a handful of Gmail accounts back then or at least after the period where you had to get a referral from someone else to create an account ended and this is long before SMS verification became common place so you could easily have almost as much storage capacity in gmail through your various accounts as you did on your home computer I got my first laptop around that time and it
only had about a 20 gigabyte hard drive so you could get that with 10 Gmail accounts of the day so for a lot of people Gmail ended up being their first ever cloud storage before anyone even really knew what cloud storage was but over the years Google's cloud has been getting really full and it's gotten to the point where they've actually had to start deleting Gmail accounts that have been inactive for 2 years or more to free up some space now to a lot of people this probably doesn't sound like a big deal because they
would say oh who's going to care if data that hasn't even been touched for two years within a Gmail inbox gets deleted but you never know I mean like I said a lot of people use this as cloud storage before proper Cloud storages were uh I guess more known in the mainstream and so if I was a betting man I would wager that a lot of people are going to lose data that is significant to them uh maybe it's passwords maybe they were crazy enough to have private keys for crypto wallets or stuff like that
uh in their Gmail account I I really hope not um or Hell there might even be accounts that are linked to that email that they forgot to update and now they're locked out of those accounts and of course if you're using your Gmail inbox as your only means of a backup for data that's not a smart move to be making in the first place but I'm looking at the bigger picture here because Google getting more conservative with the free storage that they give people is a sign to me that the free service model that big
Tech used to rely on to rope people in is actually becoming unsustainable and it makes sense especially with storage if you look at charts like this that display the cost per terabyte of disk space over the years things have really started to slow down after 2010 and the demand for data is higher than ever of course there's always more people that are getting born and then getting to the age where they start using the internet and getting a Gmail account or YouTube for the first time but instead of people just saving crappy flip foam pictures
and videos and emailing those to one another or posting them to I guess Myspace or whatever it's 4K video now right 4K video shot at 60fps and that can be done on midgrade or better smartphones that everyone has and the profits from this data haven't scaled with the amount of it that Google is responsible for just look at the recent aggression towards ad blockers being used on YouTube or the price hikes for Google Drive storage or YouTube premium which I think has actually resulted in more people just using better ad blockers and there's really not
much being done to improve the YouTube platform either uh in fact certain things like botom ments and uh crypto scams actually seem to be getting more prevalent there was just a fake SpaceX stream a few days ago with AI Elon Musk telling people that they should double their Bitcoin and you know it had a lot of views on it and I know that this video is mostly about Google specifically but other companies are making changes too that seem like they're a little bit desperate to either turn a profit in the first place or turn bigger
profits Amazon wants people to start paying for Alexa companies that make smart home appliances want people to pay subscription fees to use some of those devices most basic functionalities and even Snapchat one of the last social media companies that haven't been gobbled up by meta has started experimenting with ads being shown to people in the chat portion of the app which is the most used part of the application and Snapchat's ad network is really tiny compared to meta or Google's I don't even think that Snapchat has gone through their first antitrust trial yet so that
goes to show you how tiny they are compared to those other Giants in fact Google's ad network is so big that it's actually really complicating The divestment Proposal in their antitrust trial that they're in right now because there's been estimates from industry experts that have placed the value of Google's ad Network as high as $100 billion which is apparently too expensive for anyone to buy I mean I know that that was said about Twitter before Elon Musk bought it but still you would need two and a half Elon musks in order to buy Google's ad
network if they were divested or they were ordered to be divested by the government and that would also bring a radical change much faster to Google's platforms because as I explained in another video that I made about Google's antitrust case their ad network is their only real cash cow it's the reason why Google was able to offer things like Gmail YouTube Google Drive for free in the first place despite those Services costing Google millions of dollars a day to run but whether it this ends up coming from Market forces like just natural market forces and
the decline of innovation and digital storage or through forceful government intervention from Google losing their antitrust case it seems like the age of free stuff on the internet is coming to an end tell me your thoughts in the comments below like and share this video to hack the algorithm and have a good rest of your day
