Google makes a ton of money, basically owning all of the Internet’s advertising. Still, we get a lot of free stuff for that money.

I’ve often said that the Internet advertising model is broken. Some doof years ago set the price-per-click for an Internet ad at something stupidly ridiculous, like 1/10th of one cent. It was a guess.

Turns out that a click on an Internet ad was worth far more than what it was originally pegged at. Lots, lots more!

Had Internet advertising been properly priced, then there probably wouldn’t ever be a Google, at least not a multi-billion dollar Google.

Imagine every web site and blog making lots of money. That’s probably what would have happened had advertising on the Internet not been so screwed up initially. But that’s all past. What we have now is Google!

Google makes almost all its money from Internet advertising. That’s a lot of quid. Despite any visions you have of Google employees bathing in tubs full of treasure, most of that money goes toward freebies everyone on the Internet enjoys.

For example, free email with GMail, plus other free applications like YouTube, Picasa, Calendar, Google Voice (though it’s not widely available yet), plus free hosting for about 90 percent of the blogs out there. Oh, and there’s also that search engine that’s become a word in the English language.

Imagine a world without all that free Google stuff. Yes, similar things would exist, but you’d be paying for them.

Consider an Internet where there were freebie search engines, but they sucked. Or maybe they searched only for things people paid for you to find. You could do a more comprehensive search, but it would cost you money. That’s pretty much how things might be if there were no Google.

I’m not a fan of big companies, though I’ve got to admit that Google is coughing up quite a bit of free stuff for everyone in return for that advertising revenue.