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April 04, 2005
Putting GMail in perspective
A lot of ink has been devoted to Google's mail client, GMail, lately. Importantly, Google has increased the storage space for users' accounts from an already unheard of at the time 1 GB to 2 GB. A Maxtor OneTouch 300 GB external hard drive costs $300, a Maxtor internal 300 GB drive costs $250. That's less than $1 for every gigabyte.
Using Google Ads on my site, I've made an average of about $8 / month. My guess is that GMail users make Google a pretty decent sum, at least $1/month per user on average, because Google sells targeted advertisements that are placed in your email based on the keywords contained in your message. So the ads pay for the extra space, and the extra space attracts more users. Not a bad business plan they've got going on there.
But, it should also show consumers that storage space should not be at such a premium, as it is so cheap. Earthlink/Mindspring made a long overdue increase in storage space for their email accounts, going from 10 MB to 100 MB (1/20th of Google's capacity). That's fine for me, occasionally I'd brush up against the 10 MB limit but I rarely need to receive a file over 100 MB. However, Earthlink, Yahoo and other companies should take the lead in moving into online storage for photos, documents and other accessories. The drive space costs next to nothing, but as Google has shown the kind of loyalty it can engender from your customers can be very valuable.
Posted by Chris at April 4, 2005 01:31 PM
Comments
Amen! GMail is amazing. Hotmail recently upped their limit to 250MB for their free accounts, too, but nothing's as good as Gmail.
Posted by: rdturpin ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.chrisishardcore.com//nav-commenters.gif)
at April 5, 2005 02:32 PM
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