Considering that this is a game whose playing field is the entire planet, content generation has always been in the hands of the players. What surprises me most about Ingress is how little of the game scales that way though. Portals (the nodes players fight for control of) are submitted by players but approved manually, which typically takes 4-5 months. Likewise the game's major events ("anomalies") occur only in a few hand-chosen cities at a time, so most players have never been near one.

As for what Google gets out of it, originally Niantic's model was to build a business out of a sister app called Field Trip, which is a "show me something interesting near where I am" kind of app. Ingress was there to gamify the content generation, and presumably Field Trip would pay the bills somehow. There was also a tie-up angle, where some company (Jamba Juice?) had all its stores show up in-game as portals.

But Google acquired them before that process had gotten going, and hasn't done anything of note with Field Trip, so presumably that's not the answer. My suspicion is that they consider Ingress worthwhile just for the the data generated, and for convincing a lot of people to run around with location reporting turned on. You'd think that Google would also start doing something with the user-submitted data (e.g. surfacing the portals in Google Maps as "points of interest" or similar), but AFAIK that hasn't happened.

Android phones are constantly scanning cell and Wi-Fi networks to improve Google's geolocation, mapping, and traffic services. Google/Niantic could direct players (by setting the portal locations) to areas that need more network scanning, beyond the network scanning their Street View cars do.

At Mozilla, we are trying to do something similar with our "MozStumbler" app [1] for community "stumbling" of wireless networks. You can compare Mozilla's network coverage of the Embarcadero map in the Venture Beat article at [2]. We also have weekly leaderboards to show who has discovered the most new cell or Wi-Fi networks at [3].

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/MozStumbler/releases

[2] https://location.services.mozilla.com/map#15/37.7966/-122.39...

[3] https://location.services.mozilla.com/leaders/weekly

I had a very similar experience. A very social friend convinced me to try it.

I got immersed for about a month but then I slowly drifted away as I got the typical Google service experience.

What do I mean by Google service experience?

Got to Level 8 but also I submitted about 30 portals, spending a lot of time researching what was suitable.

Other players warned me that the response would be 2 months, but still what I got was unacceptable:

4 out of 6 portals were accepted within a month, but they were not the first 6 submitted. The rest of my submission (made over number of days) just fell off the face of earth.

I waited a few months then completely gave up on the game.

If you do not value my time to give me even a rejection e-mail, then I do not see the point in playing such a game.

AFAIK, Google are not selling advertising in ingress like that, so I think you're making bad assumptions. That doesn't leave out people spamming/gaming the system just like blackhat SEOs try to game Google search. I don't think the Ingress people really have the resources to curate all portal submissions.

It also could be to bootstrap the system, they just points of interest or business entries from Google Map's database. Otherwise, the game would be boring for most people with no portals nearby to play with.

(If you live in the suburbs, sometimes the nearest interesting thing is a Safeway or Quiznos)

Screw those guys for trying to recoup some of the millions of dollars they've spent building the game, right?

Do we know yet that they're moderating the missions?

Don't know how long it's been since you played, but there are a LOT more people playing now than even around the new year. The biggest difference to me is that L7 and 8 aren't that hard to achieve any more. I've seen people go from first login to L8 in a week, or so. Back when I hit 8 it took months of regular, dedicated work.