Comment by nwellnhof
3 years ago
What's really puzzling is that Google Analytics never got banned because of antitrust laws. It's the most obvious example of predatory pricing I've ever seen. How is a smaller company supposed to compete against a free product?
I co-founded a company called Heap that competed against Google Analytics and we were quite successful. Amplitude, Mixpanel, and others have also done so. GA’s free pricing was not really a big issue for us and customers were very willing to pay 6- and 7-figures for a differentiated quality product.
Loved Heap (Analytics?). I advocated for it while working at my previous employer :) I think we were early customers. At the time, its automatic tracking of all events was a godsend compared to hooking up specific tracking after the fact using GA events.
One broad view is that anti-trust is supposed to protect consumers, not competitors.
If a competitor can't produce a quality product that people will pay for, consumers aren't being harmed by the prevalence of a free good-enough product.
In a consumer-protection world where a free and open source Linux had 98% market share in the OS market, Microsoft or Apple would have no leg to stand on to sue its developers over anti-trust. In a competitor-protection world, they would.
The US views anti-trust through a very consumer-focused lens[1], the EU sometimes views it through a more competitor-focused one.
[1] This doesn't mean I agree with it, and there are obvious problems with trying to prove harm in a court of law, if no alternative exists.
Doesn’t predatory pricing mean “we dropped our pricing below profitability in order to kill competitors (and presumably raise our own prices once they’re dead)”?
I think you’d have a very good case against Amazon, and probably Uber/Lyft, and I’ve long wondered why no one sued them over it. But in Google’s case, Analytics is profitable for the same reason Youtube is profitable—Google makes money off the data they gather.
I did hear this in about 2014, so it could well have changed, but I thought Youtube wasn't profitable, or at the very most barely profitable
As of 2019, I was still hearing it wasn't profitable. Though that may be starting to change: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/04/youtube-is-now-build...
Google Analytics has an enterprise paid version and it starts at 6 figures, Adobe has a very competitive product in the same space. So there's definitively room for a paid product in the market.
Lots of ways? Better features, better support, better performance.
If you can't beat the free offering, then go home.
"We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas!"
- A French Ned Flanders, probably
If you can't beat the free offering, then go home.
In the real world of physical goods, there are laws against this. But Google's a tech company, so anything goes.
It's not illegal to give things away for free unless it's dumping.
6 replies →
Which real world country?
In the U.S. most antitrust law is based on protecting what's best for the consumer, not protecting the competition from a free alternative.
What a horrible law.
The market should just create a better solution or find investors to call the bluff of the offending company and make even more money
How many companies use GA as their only analytics system? It isn’t free. It has a free tier.
It's like with Cloudflare. The free Tier is what gets small companies and hobby developers in. And as they know your system but not the one of others, they'll recommend it to use when your company grows or their employer looks for an analytics system.
But I don't think it's predatory. It clearly worked for cloudflare and seems to work for Tailscale (they openly said they're using the same strategy). It would be predatory if others couldn't match that, but I'd argue many competitors could offer free plans for small websites if they wanted to.
If we enforced a law that said no product can be sold at a loss, we would get rid of almost every single startup and many recently IPOd former unicorns,