If there’s one thing to love about Google, it is the fact that they provide the majority of their products and services for free. Free email, free access to productivity software, free cloud storage (to a certain extent), free mobile operating system in the form of Android, free search, and so on.However Google has to make money and that money mostly comes from ads, something Google is very known for. But with the rise in ad blocking software such as AdBlock, you would think that Google would be very opposed to it. Interestingly enough during Google’s annual stockholders meeting, the company’s CEO Larry Page was surprisingly fine with such software.
According to Page, he thinks of it as the industry telling them that perhaps ads need to be delivered in a better and more engaging way. “Part of it is the industry needs to do better at producing ads that are less annoying, and that are quicker to load, and all those things. And I think we need to do a better job of that as an industry.”
That being said, Google is among some of the companies (that includes Microsoft) who pays services like AdBlock a fee to be added to the whitelist of ads that will be displayed, so we suppose to a certain extent they aren’t too worried as long as they keep paying those fees. There has also been some debate about whether using such software is considered legal, which the courts in Germany have ruled that it is.