Article: http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/25/google-plus-youtube/
Google is deploying a new tactic to expand their user base for their social networking site “Google+”. Google+ faces stiff competition, primarily from Facebook, however, they are hoping this new plan will help them gravitate to Facebook’s sky high level. With Google’s acquired video sharing website, YouTube, completely dominating the niche it occupies just as much as Facebook dominates its social networking niche, Google wants to levy this domination to enlarge Google+. YouTube will now require all users who want to comment on videos and upload videos to seamlessly create a Google+ account. I believe this is a clever, but slightly risky move. With total domination, this should not be difficult at all to implement successfully so long as people continue to desire to comment and upload videos. However, the quality of these newly created Google+ accounts could potentially be very low, since users are being forced as opposed to them choosing independently. In the article, the author talks about how the ultimate goal for this forced account creation would be to collect a plethora of data about more users, and to feed that data into their algorithms to serve highly tailored ads for their users. With Google earning 96% of their revenue from their advertisements system (source: http://www.investopedia.com/stock-analysis/2012/what-does-google-actually-make-money-from-goog1121.aspx), this motive absolutely appears to be true.