Have you heard of the term " pushing the free line " something I heard from Eben Pegan. He releases some really great content free, and then obviously it leads to an opt in and a product promotion - but the idea is to give out content that is so good, people think "if this is the free stuff, imagine how good the product must be" These days you could probably learn everything you need just from the free information that's given out online. Look out for product launches as they often use really great free training to build their customer lists.
Actually all these are not free. There's a price to pay sooner or later. If Google has no Adwords, it will earn by charging for other services.
You are wrong. Google DEPENDS on its advertisers. And NONE of those advertisers provide free service. If nobody need to pay for a cinema ticket after it becomes FREE, how would the cinema survive? Through ads. And if people already get used to free stuffs and they dont BENEFIT the advertisers, what will happen? The cinema will go bankrupt. in the future, i dont see internet sites will all be free and therefore depends on ads...because when they do then advertisers' ROI would be lesser and therefore the earning for the free sites will be lesser as well. I do have free sites that make money through ads and i have e-commerce sites that might dont have any loyal traffic but it makes way more money than my free sites. I agree with scheng1, there's price to pay. They have adwords, that's why it's free. They depend on ads. if let's say advertisers believe adwords is not effective, Google would charge you for their service 100%. Unfortunately, free isnt the future of business. Free site ALWAYS need paid service to advertise there. Regarding Eben Pagan and other marketing gurus stuff, they aren't called free stuffs. Those are TRIAL stuffs, and you can categorize them as e-commerce sites instead of free ones.
I totally agree with you. If you think about it, Google has never advertised soley for "Google". In the entire time they have been up, even when they were starting, they provided a good service and let word of mouth do the rest .