I do not like Google making so much money on the Internet and on the
stock market. If you are like me here
are a few simple but extremely potent things you can do to stop Google
from making so much money. Lets first define where Google gets most of
its revenue from. All products on Google.com is free with the exception
of Adwords. Google charges advertisers who sign up for Adwords, that is
when an advertiser's ads appear alongside search results for a chosen
keyword.
Google makes money when you as a Net user click on such ads. The more
users click the more money Google makes. Since Google gets at least 500
Billion pageviews in a 24 hour day, its revenues from users clicking on
'sponsored links' is over $500MM a day!
The other major source of revenue is of course Google's stock listing
on exchanges like NASDAQ, NYSE, LSE and other international markets.
There are other sources of revenues like contracts with Mozilla
Firefox, Apps for enterprises but those form a very small percentage of
revenue. Also there are some revenues from Youtube promos, but hundreds
of lawsuits are pending against it so
that's not really of much concern.
Stopping the GOOG craze
The google stock is a bubble. Most
institutional investors know this and never buy GOOG. They people who
buy GOOG and soar its price are novice
retail investors. They and their family members of course use the
google search and think "oh everyone is using this, it must be a great
stock to buy". Now apparently there is no way to stop these people. But
there is one point we can exploit. Since these people are novice they
obviously listen to stock picks from people like
Maria Bartiromo(CNBC) and
Charles Hodson(CNN),
in fact they watch those crap all day long. But they won't listen to
you or me. Just those so called experts. Then if
that's the case why don't we become a so called expert, someone like
Bartiromo! What we can do is set up a blog, post things that novice
investors
believe in, and once we have a rapport with them we can tell them how
the GOOG may be a bubble. Also add a bit of altruism by telling them to
tread cautiously. Those who help the most may always win!
The real Google story
Finally this a thing you must know. An
entire book as been written on this "subject" and each day millions of
aspiring entrepreneurs are buying that book to get a look on what they
think can be a guide map. I feel sorry for those
new entrepreneurs. So here I will put the real story on how really the
google search engine came into being and became what it is today.
Back in 1996 when Yahoo and Altavista search were ruling the Net,
students of several US universities pondered how they can use
this new trend to
obtain PhD and MS degrees. Seeing the inter-university interest,
professors who were advisors to these students proposed that if they
can build a better search algorithm than that of Altavista's they would
be granted PhDs! Many
many algorithms were submitted for review. One of them was called
BackRub. It was developed by a big group of students from various US
and European universities and which included friends
Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Though initially Sergey was not curious
about the project Larry took the algorithm to his father who also
happened to be a computer scientist. Larry's father told him how he can
tweak and modify this
algorithm and make a totally new one out of it. Armed with his father's
evil
wisdom Larry took this to his professor who informed him that if
the tweaked algorithm can be patented a lot of money can be made from
it. Larry himself couldn't do all the tweaking needed to obtain a
patent so
Sergey was brought in to add that Russian touch. The word Google
(Larry's
misspelling of googol) was born. Patent obtained, the professor took
Larry, Sergey and the
algorithm to a Stanford University trustee who also happened to be a
partner of a VC firm. Since
VC firms cannot fund such a seed idea at the very start without raising
suspicion,
Andy Bechtolsheim, a
board member
of
SUN Microsystems was called in. Andy handed over a check of $100,000
to Larry
and Sergey as angel investment. It is at this point that a massive PR
(Public
Relations) campaign
began to take shape.
Now picture this. You have obtained a product that is better
than its competitors. You have almost unlimited funding
because you belong to the Stanford community. You have no other
claimants (they are surfacing now 10 years later) because
nobody understands this search business and hence not interested. What
do you
do next? PR? What kind of PR? You have a product that you know you did
not originate or give birth. You belong to a
privileged community with unlimited funding. You have advisory backing
of people who understand this business inside out. What do you do? Hire
a
office in a five star complex and start doing ads on TV? No. Nobody
would use the
product then. Nobody wants to be part of evil. So what do you do, so
that people do use your product? What do you do so that people start
loving you? Why not become somebody else whom people would love and
whose
product
people would love to use.
A garage was rented and a credit card maxed out. One single employee
hired. Cheap second hand
computers were bought and photographed. The web design done with
free software and no professional suites were used. All these
information then PRed to every single computer mag in
every country in the world through a PR firm managed by aides of the
VCs. This way no one would know what really was going on. Millions of
dollars were spent on
PR through different different firms controlled by the VCs and their
aides. The
wait to surpass a million hits began.
It didn't take much long. Underpaid journalists working for computer
mags were all the buzz about Google. Every single article, every single
section in every single mag had a direct or indirect mention of Google.
People landed on the homepage, liked the look and feel, and the clean
search results and slowly got addicted to it. Once the million hits
mark was comfortably reached all the VC funding in the
world was poured into the company and the rest as they say is history.
The launch of the Adwords service soon followed to make the entire
process look timed. The
best computer science students were hired for astronomical salaries.
The past hidden
buried and cloaked under the
wide smiles of
hypocrite altruists. Humanity
was ushered in and fooled point blank.
To contact the author of this article send your opinion to