The site also features an HTML editor, so users can presumably make arbitrarily complex HTML pages and cut-and-paste into Google Pages. Google is offering a pretty astonishing 100 MB of disk space which could knock out the whole bottom tier of cheap web hosting services (I saw some comments in the forum about bandwidth limits, but unknown how that compares to the $5 and $10/month hosting services).

I'm a fan of cheap and (better) free web services. I'm still pretty attached to My Yahoo personal portal despite Yahoo's shameful practices in China (and have a Yahoo email address, and web page) and I use a raft of Google services (gMail, Blogger, personalized search page). I also have the home page and mail account that came with my .Mac subscription, and ditto for my Comcast broadband service.

Clearly, Google's ability to monetize web presences means they can give away things others charge for, and still make money. A web hoster charges people around $10 a month to cram hundreds (or thousands) of sites on a creaking web server with limited bandwidth. Google presumably thinks they can average enough from ad revenue derived from free web sites hosted on their state of the art clusters and network infrastructure to more than pay the hardware and networking bills.

Which raises an interesting notion. If I make a very popular page on Google (for free), and do the work to make it interesting and drive lots of traffic, then it has potential to make money for a Google - and Google will pay me, via their ad revenue sharing for my popular site. Traffic, aka 'eyeballs' are the currency, here. So, it would seem that the once scorned 'eyeballs' that were the goal of so many busted dotcoms have come full circle, and are now driving the Google phenomenon...
Comments 9:58:03 PM    

Chris Gulker's view from Silicon Valley - in words and pictures