Onya, Google

[Hermit]

Google's parent company, Alphabet, reported $257.6 billion worth of revenue last year, of which $76 billion was profit. Nice margin.

So, what is it actually selling? Much of it is information. Personal information about us, the users of its services. We are the product.

Big Brother has been with us for a long time, but not exactly in the form George Orwell imagined it in Nineteen Eighty-Four. For one thing, surveillance is owned and run by private enterprise. For another, it is much more thorough. Thirdly, it is almost invisible.

And here is how Google harvests the product it sells: https://contrachrome.com/

Considering the growth in revenue



and profit



there'll be more of that in the years to come. Much, much more.

[pErvinalia]

I for one welcome our Google overlords.

[Brian Peacock]

I have absolutely nothing to do with Google, except when I'm on the internet.

[macdoc]

You have to be careful as that revenue is mostly from purchased ads - not selling data tho it is a slippery slope.

Advertising remained the main revenue-generating segment for Google in 2021. During the examined year, 81.3 percent of Google's revenue came from advertising on Google properties and YouTube

https://seekingalpha.com/article/446998 ... make-money

and

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/g ... he%20world.

So is it google the villain or say Nike

[Svartalf]

Fuck google and alphabet, I'm seriously considering taking leave of youtube, as the sheer amound of ad interruptions is seriously unsufferable, and many of those ads are for google products...

[pErvinalia]

Use Brave browser. You won't get ads.

[Brian Peacock]

... or use the AdBlocker+ extension for Chrome/Chromium.

[Svartalf]

Use Brave browser. You won't get ads.

Thanks for the tip. I had discounted brave because it wasn't in my habits and didn't provide a certain capacity I was looking for at the time, but if it lets me see youtube in peace, it's gonna be worthit. Any addons or settings I should be careful about?

[Svartalf]

... or use the AdBlocker+ extension for Chrome/Chromium.

chrome being a google product, I use it only to seach for and watch dog and horse porn

[macdoc]

Brave rocks.

[Svartalf]

Use Brave browser. You won't get ads.

I knew the settings myght be weird, here I have downloaded and installed it, and gone to youtube, and the site has nothing for me to click on, no proposed clips, no way to connect, nothing, just gray and non responsive frames

[Svartalf]

Use Brave browser. You won't get ads.

I knew the settings myght be weird, here I have downloaded and installed it, and gone to youtube, and the site has nothing for me to click on, no proposed clips, no way to connect, nothing, just gray and non responsive frames

Case resolved, had to lower shields and allow javascript though, and my first video, oh delight, DID start with an effing ad!

So I don't know how you do it, but me, it seems brave is no different from other browsers, it doesn't protect me

[Brian Peacock]

I use Chromium w/ AdBlocker+ for all Google account related stuff. Gmail, YouTube, Drive, Docs, Calendar, etc. Never see an ad, ever. But I have a phone with Google operating system so there's no point hiding from them. I do use gexsi as that browser's default search engine though - it returns Google results but a slice of the revenue goes to environmental and other good causes. Main browsing is still done on good old Firefox and duckduckgo - with NoScript and pretty strict cookie, privacy and data settings.

[Svartalf]

Thanks

[Hermit]

Use Brave browser. You won't get ads.

I knew the settings myght be weird, here I have downloaded and installed it, and gone to youtube, and the site has nothing for me to click on, no proposed clips, no way to connect, nothing, just gray and non responsive frames

The Firefox browser in, conjunction with Adblock Plus and uBlock Origin add-ons, has nixed all ads. I am particularly pleased not to have a single one of them interrupting Youtube videos for well over a dozen years.