Ages ago I did a post on how ad-funded services were likely to die off, and other methods of monetization that people could use. I didn’t even think about how all that would affect Google until I just noticed a post on valleywag regarding them making more of their services paid for.

That really doesn’t surprise me though; Google is the prefect company to be making money through freemium services. At the moment they’re focusing mainly on the business markets, which makes sense since they have more motivation to pay for a service and they’ll also need better customer support which comes at a price, and they know it. No feathers are ruffled there.

It just makes sense to charge those guys.

How about making money from us individuals using freemium revenue sources?

I’d be pretty pissed if Google Reader started limiting the number of feeds I can subscribe to, unless I paid $5 a month. It’s not that the service isn’t worth paying for – I love it, it’s been my  homepage for the past few years – but there are alternatives out there that I could easily switch to. If all else fails, I could just program my own. I wouldn’t put up with having to pay for it.

So how can Google make money from it, that isn’t advertising (which they don’t)?

We can just go back to the idea of charging businesses, or power users. I know that some of the blog author’s that I read use Google Reader for research and second-hand-news purposes (which most of it is on the internet, like this post for instance). I’m sure if Google paneled them they’d find a whole host of features that reports need and are willing to pay for in order for their job to be easier or for them to produce better content, finding news quicker.

There could be a feature for paid users only which gives links and citation data to other websites and even news papers which Google have archived. They have all the known internet at their finger tips, why not tell the people looking for it about it? They could order these links by the sentiments of the pages; are you looking for pages pro-, or anti-Apple? is the author liberal or conservative? Those kinds of things would help authors do their job, and I’m sure Gawker or Wired wouldn’t mind paying for it. Hell, if I could afford it, I’d get it for when I (very occasionally) do reviews on here.

So, again I’ve come to the conclusion that service providers should charge their business and pro-users, becuase they aren’t willing to leave. Give them a few nicher features and you’re good to go.