I agree, Google is really undermonetized. Right now, most of the services they offer don't make any money directly. GMail only makes money from AdWords. Google Reader doesn't make a cent at all! All of their services, especially YouTube, could be making a lot of money directly but right now they only make money from AdWords ads displayed in them...
Heck, who said they have to sell, stock, and ship physical products? They can easily register an an affiliate for popular products and then do what you say in your post.
Even selling a sponsorship spot on their homepage would raise a ton of money.
Thing is, Google will certainly expand beyond AdWords as a major money maker in the future. What people don't get here is that they really only care about the share holders, not the users, not the webmasters.
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