Google's "other revenue"[0] for Q3 was $3.4 billion of the $27 billion it made that quarter. Other revenue is mainly Play, Cloud, and Hardware. So I'd say Google is making a lot of money from other avenues.
[0] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204417...
Google is the master of leeching and rent-seeking.
Just as they pit advertisers against each other to drive up prices for impressions on third party sites, for which they keep a large middelman fee, they use the same tactics on Google Play. Developers get to bid on the #1 search result spot, while Google is milking them for 30% of gross revenue for providing a rather abysmal ZIP file download service. They are only able to charge such high fees because of the exclusivity and network effects from being pre-installed on every GMS Android phone.
Other examples of similar rent-seeking platforms are Apple App Store, Windows Store, Steam.
Many Google APIs either offer paid premium tiers (eg. Maps) or are pay per use (all Cloud APIs).
Re:Google API Explorer
by manigandham on Saturday December 02, 2017 @11:37PM
(#15835987)
They have plenty of commercial products and Google Cloud Platform is likely to make more money then the entire ads business in the future.
A solution could be to let the users pay a little money for google services (and avoid tracking / use of its data for advertising? )