I saw today's article in the New York Times and that is how I found this really excellent site and made me think that this was the perfect place to throw out this idea for Google to offer. As Google looks for ways to increase revenues through AdSense, doesn't a co-branded email option via Gmail make a very logical offering for them? Our site is The Student Center and we have just moved our domain name to http://www.student.com, which is a really excellent domain. We want to start offering our users free email now that each user could have an account of username@student.com We know for sure that it would get tons of traffic. The thing is we don't want to get into the email provider business so we will co-brand this with somebody. But Google's gmail would be just perfect for this. If we could use Google's gmail for our free email service and slap Google AdSense ads on all the emails, then this would be perfect. Google would make much more money off of our site and we would make a decent amount of money from it. But they don't offer the service yet. The one time I talked to somebody directly at Google about this, he just said that it was a service that might be of interest to them and chances are that they would offer it sometime in the future. What does anybody else think? I would imagine that there are many users of this forum who have a site where their users would use a free email address. I realize that there are already many free email providers. But the amazing thing is how many people use a variety of email accounts, so I know many people would use ours if we offered it.
Why would Google be willing to do this when with GMail they earn 100% of the revenue showing their own ads. From a business point of view it doesn't really make sense for them to start sharing that revenue.
If the choice was simply using Gmail or using our co-branded product, then yes, they'd be losing revenue. But that's not the choice. Our users are now using tons of different email programs, only a small percentage of them being Gmail. Therefore, if we offered this product, it simply has to be the case that Google would earn far more money than they are now from our users' email accounts.