Can someone explain the business model behind blogger?

I realize that in the search engine world, the business is all about market share and customer retention. So I can understand why Google would want a popular blogging tool associated with itself.

But beyond that, what else does Blogger.com/Blogspot.com possibly offer Google other then millions of pages of adsense spam and a huge drain on Google's bandwidth?

Maybe it is soley about getting people to use Google's products. But I don't really see how they make any money of it at all.

Thoughts?

 

I think you've found the solution. What you call Google spam is not spam, as every publisher is free to add Google Ads.
So the business model is very simple :
- Build a brand (Blogger) and confort Google as the central point of internet
- Generate millions of $ by enhancing the numbers of impressions, the number of visitors, and so, the numbers of advertisers and the eCPM

Just my 2 cts

 

It is a huge social networking data provider as well (just as with Orkut). Google are in a win win situation.

 

Ah mate - that's what they want more than anything else.

 

Yea. I get it now. Seems pretty obvious.

 

I realize a lot of blogger sites are just built by spammers, but you can't say Google encourages that. If those kinds of sites are reported, Google will delete them.

So, to take a less skeptical view of the same answer, I'd guess when Google took over Blogger, they had planned its business model to be based on AdSense on quality blogs. It's a different approach than in the pre-blog days of Geocities, where ads are forced upon every page. Now, Google is leaving it up to the person running the blog to put up their own ads, and of course they make it easy to do so.

 

They dont even need to make money off it yet really. If they can hold a decent userbase as blogging evolves the value will be huge, especially with orkut, gmail, talk, maps, no need to leave the grid.

In the meantime they get lots of adsense penetration into non site owners and a bit of extra cash.

 

- BRANDING
- 100's of millions of content pages to show Ads from their ad network
- a HUGE database of user behaviour
- a way to see how spammers work, how their pages/sites evolve, change and so on...
- BRANDING
- and millions of pages for Ads!

Seriously though, do you have any idea how valuable the user data is? They analyze every single visit and the behaviour of those visitors... plus the amount if inside info they get to combat spam is crazy!

Pete.