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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

Sure, its $10m today, but think of all the other potential startups that they're doing this to, and how many millions they're throwing away, and billions over the long haul. Reddit, Twitter, and company all got big because they had open APIs and people were able to use them extensively for really creative things.

I agree, Google has swallowed up the video streaming market unfortunately.

I keep thinking back to how Vine was basically TikTok, and they threw it away.

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Take it from someone who watched with interest, Reddit and Twitter did not get big due to open APIs. They got their first big steps before they even had APIs... In the first year of twitters launch it was in the news in the UK at 300k users in press releases about how it was a "new form of communication" etc... 2008 was actually when the original set of API-laden websites began to fade because with the recession, we could not have nice things be free so much. Many API services fell into disrepair in 2009, certainly the peak of APIs for the UK was around 2008. Check out Tom Scotts video on this for a picture of the open API internet many people thought would occur (and which did exist in some places until FAANG began to productise and dominate and use accounts across products which do not incentivize APIs). Yes it is true open network graphs/facebook etc had some API access, but the APIs before were more single purpose and numerous; facebook lets you explore their network and to some extent data, but that's not the same as the useful APIs that became restricted, paid or were cut in the aftermath of the recession.

Those startups are their competitors. You don’t have to pay millions of dollars to acquire a competitor that was never started because of your inconsistent API policy.

Google makes enough money that losing several currently non-existent revenue streams that are theoretically $10 million apiece isn’t hurting them. It’s hurting their users.

Google is all about ads - why would they give a shit about the users?

>Sure, its $10m today, but think of all the other potential startups that they're doing this to, and how many millions they're throwing away, and billions over the long haul.

Google made $300B last year. "billions over the long haul" is a lot of money, an unimaginable amount even, to you and I. But to Google?

> Google made $300B last year.

No, Google made $73.795B last year. Revenue is not profit, net income is profit and what you ‘make’ as a company.

Revenue is not profit.

First off - how much of revenue usage last year was on fines etc. That is to say profit they could potentially have had.

Second there is lots of revenue you use for "business" because you don't want to pay taxes on the profit and anyway it is giving you something you like to have.

How much of Google's revenue is used to do things for top executives and people with power in the company that is really something they (the executives) should be taxed on but is instead a business expense of google (cars, transport, 'working' vacations, security, super cool chefs preparing meals at the company...) Hard to say really because if you knew the answer it would actually be something they were taxed on. But it's not 0 - sure probably not a billion, but a couple hundred million splashed around wouldn't surprise me.

How much of Google's revenue usage is for wages and other forms of payout to executives etc. (stock) that does not get counted as profit but of course it is amounts those people want to have.

Google made $73.795B profit last year, and expensed slightly over 262B - some portion of which the people who run Google no doubt personally thought of the way we would consider profit in our day to day existence, and another portion of which were fines for things they did in getting the rest of the money.

Literally none of that is relevant for much the corporate entity made (I.e. what the shareholders got).

Obviously the fines, which are the first thing mentioned, is relevant for how much the shareholders got.

Literally the other stuff is relevant for how remunerative the people who actually run the companies, day-to-day, feel those companies are (put in day-to-day because I got the feeling you might give me a lecture about the shareholders actually running the company)

Personally I think you have a decent point since in practice employees of GOOG are shareholders too. Although I don’t know if their interests matter to the corporate entity because I don’t know what percentage is held by insiders.

I don't think that's nearly as universal an assumption as you're claiming. Like--I made $X,000 dollars last year, but I also have a mortgage and like to eat food.

Mortgage accumulates equity. Bad example

Mortgage interest payments don't

Your assets might inflate in value, but that's nothing to do with the mortgage

By that logic I make what I can save, lol

Well yes.

Companies get to write off expenses of existing

People don't

right, which if you follow that assumption you can see that things are not as great as you thought.

The assumtion things were great wasn’t mine. I live in a HCL area and am not able to save much so in this sense the ‘profit’ of my work is close to zero. That is not great at all…

Even if we subscribe to this interpretation, the overall point stands.

Revenue isn't profit, but your wasted business expenditures are properly measured against your revenue. That's what they're spent from.

I mean, they "make" both. "Make" does not imply profit. If you say a company "made" a revenue figure, then you mean it in the revenue sense. It's contextual.

That’s like saying a trading company made a trillion dollars because you counted all of the securities sales but not the costs.

No, it’s not contextual. “Company X made $N billion dollars” only means one thing, net income.

100% contextual. In every business where I've been an executive, or had access to the budget, we talk "made" as gross revenue and EBIDA as a stand in gross profit and specifically call out net profit in internal meetings. For example, "We made 10 million with an EBIDA of 1 million and net of 200,000.00." Using EBIDA to talk to potential investors and as a guiding metric if we didn't have a well established gross profit formula that followed GAAP.

Sorry bro it's contextual.

This is a bizarre nitpick.

1. I know it's revenue - the GP says The impact on google losing $10m of revenue

2. Do you think the 10m that Google would have booked from API usage would be booked as pure profit?

It's a testimate to the health of our free market that the company throwing away millions, and billions over the long haul, is the overwhelmingly dominant market leader.

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