Could an alternative to the current usage limits system be devised by Google ? I can understand the need to charge large commercial users but the licence costs for semi-commercial ad supported sites (like mine) mean that Google Maps become unviable once usage levels hit this limit. With the current system developers are deserting Google Maps for other platforms.
Recently I observed the limits being exceeded on one of my projects. Effectively the map is killed off with an 'Oops something went wrong' message at certain times of the day. Compare this approach to Google services such as YouTube where its possible to get millions of hits for videos that consume way more bandwidth than the average maps does. YouTube has ad support options and Google Maps used to have the Ad Unit option until this feature was removed from the API. If Google want to encourage developers to use the API then they really should offer an option to display maps beyond the current usage limits, provided that ad units similar to YouTube ads get displayed. I would certainly prefer a popup ad on my maps instead of the current 'Oops something went wrong' message. One important feature should be the ability to hide ads after a certain time has elapsed (as YouTube does) - the old ad units did not have this feature which made them annoying for a lot of users. Offering an ad unit option with the ability to earn a bit of revenue from the ads would do a lot to help the developer community. Large commercial users would continue to pay for their premium licences so as not to have ads displayed on the maps, therefore it would be a win win situation, boosting usage for the Maps API and boosting ad revenues for Google and for map developers. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Maps JavaScript API v3" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to google-maps-js-api-v3+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to google-maps-js-api-v3@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/google-maps-js-api-v3. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
