Ever since Hangouts launched for Google+, I knew it had tremendous potential for a lot of things, from group video chatting, to podcasts, to political debates and interviews, and so on. But this requires a lot of bandwidth, and Google may have just found the best way to monetize the service, without charging “normal” users or even showing them ads. With Google Helpouts They will instead charge experts or professionals who want to sell their assistance by the minute or by the session, 20 percent of what they’re making, which seems reasonable enough.
There are many experts on Google+ and Hangouts already who are offering all kinds of help to their followers, and this could be a great way for them to make some money, too. If the buyer of this service is not satisfied, Google can return 100 percent of the money.
If this becomes very popular, it could make Google Hangouts in general very popular, too, and could even overtake Skype when it comes to video-chatting, which is something I’m sure Google would like, without having to pay $8 billion for it, like Microsoft did.
It could also help make Google+ itself become more popular, if everyone is on it, the same way everyone is on Facebook, whether they use it or not. Google+ still has a problem of engagement, which may also be because people feel not everyone they know is on it. By getting everyone on Google+ through whichever way possible (Youtube, Play Store, etc), that feeling may eventually disappear, and people will start to interact with their friends on Google+ either on the website or through video Hangouts.
In the same time, paid services like Helpouts could help a lot of people build their own businesses on top of Google+, while Google will be getting part of their revenue, and will be able to pay for the costs of the network without pushing increasing more ads to the users’ faces like Facebook does in order to maintain a certain revenue growth every year. Not having to push ads to pay for the costs would be good for Google and also Google+ users.