Google offers free products and platforms to the public and organizations, but why? As Google has become the leading institution for exploring the internet they have developed a hunger for understanding the entirety of this global communication network. From commerce and syndication to click-path behavior, Google is seeking to observe it all.
For the purposes of this blog post we are going to investigate one of Google’s most effective and innovative tool, Google Analytics. According to advanced-web-metrics.com, “Google Analytics has been deployed in some form by around 60% of the companies in the Fortune 1000.“ Here is a list of just a few of the clients that Google provides their free platform for. 
But why would Google really feel incentivized to offer their Analytics platform for free? What gain would they share in with their pro-bono clients? The answer is quite simple really, Google gains the unprecedented ability to follow traffic around the internet from website to website, essentially making them passive overseers of massive quantities of data. But, this by itself doesn’t answer the question of why Google Analytics is free.
Google Analytics is free, like Mozilla Firefox, in order to lower the barriers to entrance as much as possible. As any YouTube video, another Google property, has the potential to do, Google designed an application that went viral. Google Analytics is free, in part, to allow for a greater degree of adoption by the largest number of users.
But what does this mean? Depending on your position on the trustworthiness of Google, your opinion of the risk that is at stake is a variable. It is likely that Google is using the information they are gathering to design the next generation of web tools, however, there is the chance that Google has a nefarious side.
With any slogan comes the PR benefit, “Don’t be evil,” being Google’s. Would it be too ironic or outlandish to assume that Google may abuse their amazing power? You decide.
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