Google wants your money now!
In a blog posting Thursday, Google announced a plan that will allow digital pack rats to pay for extra storage for Google’s e-mail, Picasa online photo service and–in the near future–its online word processing and spreadsheet applications.
Google already gives users one gigabyte of storage on Picasa and 2.8 gigabytes worth of storage on its Gmail e-mail service. “Consider this your overflow solution,” Ryan Aquino, software QA engineer lead for Picasa Web albums, wrote on the post.
The move is a modest shift for Google, which generates all but the thinnest slice of its revenues from online advertising. Those ads subsidize everything from online search to generous amounts of storage for everything from e-mail to online documents. And with advertising making up 99% of Google’s $3.9 billion in revenues during its latest quarter, the announcement won’t change Google’s focus on online advertising.
But the shift is a sign that the trend toward ad-subsidized online services has its limits. In an effort to keep up with Google’s rapid growth, its competitors have adopted Google’s tactic of offering users increasingly generous amounts of storage space. Since May, Yahoo! has offered users unlimited amounts of storage for e-mail messages. Microsoft’s e-mail service offers users two gigabytes of free space. AOL offers five gigabytes for free.
But with users gobbling up ever larger amounts of space on Google’s servers for everything from spreadsheets to photos, Google may be looking for a way to accommodate users who need more space, without getting ahead of what its online ads can pay for. And the offer is clearly not intended to put Google in the business of offering online storage. Cheaper space can be had by going with upstarts such as Mozy, which offers unlimited online storage for $4.95 a month. By contrast, Google’s storage plans start at $20 a year for six gigabytes, with larger plans ranging up to 250 gigabytes for $500 a year.
Google shares rose $1.02 to $515.75 in trading Friday
