I was trying to find this discussion. How many if these accounts actually exist and how many if them do they think will actually convert.
Reading the comments I found a number of things:
- There are actually a lot of these accounts.
- A lot of people were paying for extra storage anyways.
But it still seems like the math doesn't work out. They are probably using a lot of current users for adding services like YouTube premium, extra space, Google Pay... as well as losing a lot of future users because they have just pissed them off. A lot of buisbesses that may have naturally expanded might just migrate to new providers now and angry people may pick other providers in the future.
It seems like maintaining this must have cost near zero. Overall it was likely actually profitable if you count total cost for these accounts vs all spend. There is probably a decent amount of new revenue, but a lot of this probably would have occured naturally on its own and you are cutting off this marketing forever.
It seems like I must be missing the true reason. Unless they really, really whatef that short-term small profit bump.
