Trading a house for ads may seem expensive today but it is only one order of magnitude difference taking median home price, fact that most people get it on 30 year mortgage and average ARPU for ads.
Let’s also notice that ad monetization is increasingly aggressive which I assume is what most your team collegues have as some sort of OKR—given how we came from the world of ‘ads are bad’ to a world where nowadays we have entire Google search results beings ads and Youtube plays a commercial every 30 seconds. With this pace of growth ARPU will probably match average yearly mortgage payments in 5-10 years. Even if my math is off by some we are talking about ad-homes in our lifetime.
Or forget even that, you can just extend payoff period and get there today. Google could just “gift” ad-enabled homes to 20 year olds today to have contractual ~70 year payoff period (with increased ARPU as well as adhomes would monetize better).
So the question for you is—is this the world you want your children to grow in?
Jeff, the main premise of your article “better ads than paywalls” is a weak argument. Would you prefer to drive a car, given to you for free, but you have to be exposed to ads all the time you drive it? Would you prefer to live in a home that was given to you for free but every wall, every mirror and every device is recording everything you do and playing ads non-stop? Paywalls are meaningful. The “wall” protect us, our privacy, our thoughts, our sanity and gives us guarantees via a two way contract.
You can argue that some people would opt-in into a free ad-monetized homes, and it is probably the future the Google envisions. But I am pretty sure that is not the world you want your kids to grow up in.
ps. Hard to argue against Larry and Sergey’s note in Appendix A of https://research.google/pubs/pub334/: