Some of the value of Alexa or GMail goes beyond direct dollars brought in. The Washington Post loses money, but its value goes beyond subscription and advertising revenue. The Dodge Viper lost money as a model, but helped restore the lustre of the entire Dodge brand.
If people aren’t using Alexa, the might get Next or iHome or whatever. It is about getting people to buy into your ecosystem. Sometimes the monetization part comes later. When Google bought YouTube, it was a very popular money loser. Not anymore.
In critiquing another writer's work I typed into my Gmail message:
"I don't want to nitpick, but..."
Within minutes I started getting ads for head lice treatments.
What's Google's Motto? "Be Evil"?
My Instagram account was hacked and there is NO customer service! Imagine that. A company worth hundreds of billions of dollars and you can’t contact a single person. All you get is an AI program to run you in circles and get know where.
Gee, take a selfie and submit it to us to get your account back! Umm, I don’t take selfies with my acct. So good luck getting it back. I conduct some business on there so that’s gone.
One of the many reason I run my own email service for my domains, it is actually pretty easy to do
The value of Alexa is that it can listen to your subversive dinner table conversations and record them verbatim for use in future prosecutions by the DoJ. Amazon surely gets a nice subsidy in the black budget for keeping these wiretaps operational.
They don't have to. Every online retailer you buy from using your Gmail account is that much more likely to advertise with Google.