If Google Wants to Make an Extra Billion Dollars Tomorrow…
…It should start charging $1 per month for Gmail service. Twitter users probably represent one zillionth of the Gmail user base (yes, that is an exaggeration) and here is the Twitter reaction when Gmail went down for less than 30 minutes today:
Bravo Google, the world needs Gmail. I would venture a guess that at only $1 per month Google would likely retain well over 50% of its current user base. That’s a whole lot of dollars…
Good lord boys
Google will never do such a thing & even if it did. I would be more then glad to pay them one freaking dollar per month for all the freaking services they provide. I can’t imagine how much time & energy & hassle I have saved my self from using google & its apps.
@madmike. Quit your bitchin.
I have a gmail account, and while I’ve had great service, I still can’t figure out why everyone likes over everything else. What makes gmail so different? I almost feel like it’s “tech-hip” at the moment, thus the massive. I use mobileme just for the push email…outside that, the web client interface is terrible.
With all the free email services out there, I don’t think I’d pay for it.
The only appreciable difference with gmail seems to be the spam filter. It works like magic.
Something tells me the value of the ads displayed to Gmail users is > $1 per month per user. So the acceptable sacrifice of user base to charge $1 would have to be based on the ad revenue lost vs the subscription revenue gained…
This ignores users who use POP or IMAP to pull their mail into a 3rd party client.
Yeah, if they started to charge they would hemorrhage customers! There are too many free email services out there for Google to even THINK about going paid and not retaining a free version. Plus, Gmail is Ad supported, so the more customers they have, the more money they make.
You guys don’t pay for anything that’s also ad supported? No SaaS such as Last.fm? No cable TV?
I would gladly pay $1/month for Gmail. Tons of storage, amazingly reliable, best spam filtering I’ve ever experienced, solid IMAP, and so on.
In any event, the $1/month concept was merely to highlight how many people are extremely reliant on Gmail. As in; so many people are reliant on Gmail that if they each paid a dollar, Google would make a billion in a day. Not factual, not reality-based…
Honestly I’ve had GMail for over a year now and can’t remember the last outtage.
lol if that happened goodbye gmail o_o;
Why did you think you should post this article?
@Glenn: I’ve had Gmail since April 1, 2004 (launch day) and I can’t remember the last outage. That said, there are some days I’d gladly pay for an email server outage, just to stop the madness that is work and take a long lunch break.
I never even noticed they were down; my “real” email is Exchange at work, personal mail (at my domain) is on Google Apps. If they dropped the free service, I’d pay whatever fee because its been dead reliable and works better than any email service I’ve used in the past 12 years.
If Yahoo and Hotmail and others are comprable today, its only because Gmail raised the bar to where it is. Remember when Gmail launched with 1 GB of storage? Hotmail offered 2 MB at the time.
As others said though, Google is making a LOT more than that off ads. I’ve done some work for clients that involved setting up Adsense accounts as both an advertiser and a site that ran ads, and there’s a lot of money pumped through Adsense every hour of every day. They offer paid Gmail with no ads — Google Apps for business clients. But they wouldn’t throw away half the client base for a few million dollars per month.
Hey I wont pay, i move on!!!
The pop service was never interrupted. Only the webmail application was down. I had zero interruptions all day and I am set to auto receive every 3 min. Whether Gmail was a a paid service or a free service, nothing is ever going to be 100% perfect. Errors occur and it’s a part of life. It doesn’t require lawsuits, stress, or anger. It simply requires something a lot of people don’t have in this day and age. It’s called having some friggin’ patience! If your whole life revolves around Gmail or Google Apps, then you do not have a life. This 30 minute interruption of service should have been a godsend for you people. It gave you 30 minutes to go take a walk, grab some coffee, call your loved ones. Come on people, seriously? It was 30 minutes…..
What makes GMail so valuable for me is its conversation-based message list. It’s infinitely easier to keep track of the conversation with threaded messages right there.
Ok dude your check is in the mail for .001 of a cent due to the lost hour of 1 dollar service for a month. Your living in dreamland waisting peoples time.
no way in
h. e. double l
will i pay for a free email client, unless as others commented, it included push email, contacts calendar, etc
First, BGR – what good is comment moderation when you let madmike go at it? If there was ever a need to moderate – he would be it.
Second, madmike represents all that is wrong with America. Something goes wrong – sue. Even when the damages are non-existent. It’s a free service that experienced a small hiccup for an hour. Big freaking deal.
And finally – I’m really sure that madmike had nothing important in his email. He certainly isn’t a professional. He can’t run his own business (who would deal with him)? He’s obviously a 15 year old punk kid, incapable of doing anything other than using vulgarity in a weak attempt to debate another individual.
Wow. I have garnered a fan base. Nice.
Also, Reagan was still president when I was 15. I was using vulgarity because 1.) I’m an asshole and 2.) I had a few drinks in me.
Furthermore, I’m a firefighter by day (or night) but took a little engineering side job I do over the internet.
Last but not least, I _didn’t_ say I would sue. I merely stated that I would be litigiously pissed if it was a pay service. It’s not a pay service and it just happened to go down when I was expecting an important email. It had actually nothing to do with work or business, but a cruise I’m going on in December. It went down at the wrong time and I made a drunk comment. The more I got flamed, the further downhill it went. That’s it. Plain and simple.
Do you want to apologize for commenting under the influence?
Chill out bud. It’s a website comment system – nothing more.
Should they ever start charging for service, I’ll take my business elsewhere. Simple as that.
“commenting under the influence”
LOL…I love it.
Go get em Mike!
Fuck these typical haters!
It’s just a website comment system. Nothing More! Even if you were “under the influence”.
Fuckin haters.
Yeah MadMike FanClub!
They already make tons of money through gmail with ads. That’s their thing, ads. Google does not make app money through charging clients. But Google will never charge users.
Dear Gmail,
Can we please have free webhosting. We would also like unlimited bandwith.
Thanks.