What Would a Submit-Google Google Look Like?
Picture-Illustration: Intelligencer
On SEC-filed paper, Google’s guardian firm, Alphabet, is in nice form. Each essential a part of its enterprise is rising. It nonetheless owns the world’s primary interface for the net. It’s the biggest promoting firm on this planet, raking in tens of billions of {dollars} in revenue within the first months of the 12 months, elevating dividends, and authorizing inventory buybacks.
It’s additionally an organization with, fairly immediately, so much to fret about. The federal government is presently threatening to interrupt it up, with a selected concentrate on cleaving off Chrome, the preferred browser on this planet and a supply of monumental site visitors to Google’s advert enterprise (firms which have expressed curiosity in shopping for it just lately embrace OpenAI and Yahoo, which known as it “arguably a very powerful strategic participant on the net”). And whereas Google’s earnings recommend a wholesome search enterprise, the corporate is nonetheless within the strategy of overhauling it fully, spooked by the recognition of ChatGPT, fearful about promoting competitors from Amazon, and attempting to get out in entrance of an internet that’s struggling one thing akin to ecological collapse.
As Google tells it — together with nearly each main tech firm in 2025 — the best way ahead is AI all over the place and in every thing. Most clearly for Google, it means new search options, Gemini chatbots throughout its product vary, and a fast remaking of a few of its core manufacturers, from Docs to Gmail to Android, with LLMs. Much less visibly, it means enterprise-AI instruments, new ad-targeting tech, and promoting AI options (or labor) via Google Cloud. For now, the connection between AI and Alphabet’s precise enterprise is difficult to tease out. It’s spending some huge cash, in fact, and it’s making some claims. Sundar Pichai emphasised that its Search Overviews, the AI-generated blurbs on the high of search pages, now have “1.5 billion customers per 30 days,” which is an terrible lot of individuals. But additionally, How couldn’t they? Google turned them on by default for many customers, and now they seem routinely. If Google had higher AI information than this, it most likely would have shared it.
What Google did share have been a number of different clues about what a post-Google Google would possibly appear like, or no less than a Google during which internet search isn’t the agency’s main enterprise, neither of which is primarily about AI. One is that YouTube, the dimensions and income of which Google didn’t begin disclosing till 2020, now accounts for almost a tenth of Alphabet’s complete income and remains to be rising shortly. (For the previous few years, it’s additionally outranked Netflix, which is often portrayed because the standard-bearer for streaming when it comes to viewing time on precise televisions, which could sound both fully apparent or fully insane, relying in your age.) Firms like Netflix have a reputable declare over the way forward for TV distribution, however YouTube brings with it a novel economic system of TV manufacturing, too.
The opposite unusual merchandise in Google’s report was a line about paying prospects. “Pushed by YouTube and Google One, we surpassed 270 million paid subscriptions,” the corporate stated. YouTube affords an ad-free tier, which is comparable in value to a streaming service, and YouTube TV, a fast-growing and dearer cable different. There’s additionally YouTube Music, which is usually bundled with YouTube Premium, a Spotify competitor. These are pretty easy subscription merchandise within the sense that folks pay for them to be able to get one thing new or completely different: Entry to media, reduction from advertisements, and extra options.
Google One, nonetheless, is one thing else and sure accounts for a big portion of that 270 million. On the high tier, it’s a bundle that features entry to Google’s newest AI fashions. On the much more in style backside tier, which prices $2 a month, it’s only a manner to purchase extra storage when your Gmail account is full otherwise you need extra space for images taken together with your Android telephone. It’s Google’s model of iCloud+, which has additionally been a quietly huge income for Apple. These are a special type of subscription product, much less elective than mandatory and fewer marketed than immediately induced. (I’d wager most “subscribers” to Google One, who begrudgingly consented to a $2-a-month inbox toll, aren’t accustomed to the official identify of it.)
Even with out the speculative narratives of AI, this implies the potential for a really completely different Google within the coming years. Google grew right into a $2 trillion firm primarily by making a gift of its merchandise and charging advertisers for entry to its customers; now, a few of its fastest-growing companies with essentially the most room to broaden are issues prospects anticipate, or are anticipated, to pay for.
