Someone on the radio today, Drudge hosting Rush's show I think said Google is reporting themselves to be worth 24 BILLION dollars...how do they figure that??
The only numbers I've seen on them say $150 million on sales of $450 million. The euphoria over their AdWords is bound to slow down at some point. Some of their most important partnerships, like with Yahoo, are in peril, so I think the $24 billion is wildly optimistic.
[quote:f36cc6dd19]some of their most important partnerships, like with Yahoo are in peril[/quote:f36cc6dd19] Google's relationship with yahoo has little effect in its Revenue ... Google is simply the algorithimic search provider of yahoo which pays around 6 million for the service and it dont have any paid search deal with yahoo (yahoo uses overture) ... IMO 6 Mil is pocket change to google :) The last i heard the total revenue will be around 1 billion this year... I exactly dont know about the profits but a major chuck will be profits (around 50-60%) because unlike Overture , google dont have to pay the majority for its traffic partners (as most of the paid ads are displayed in Google's site ) And also Google is sitting on top of potential gold mines like its product search Froogle (still in beta) and its contextual Ad distribution Service called Adsense.... Also its working on local search (this if sucessfull will eat a big chunk of the multi-billion yellow pages industry !) This combined with international expansion will be the major growth areas for Google in coming years . But said all this i think M$N's search moves are a threat to Google . I dont think MS will deliver a superior product but they have a long history of sucess in pushing mediocre products because of their control in the distribution channels WINDOWS/Internet Explorer ... Gopinath Subbaraj
Microsoft is going to build the search right into the Operating System for their next version. They have been indexing a lot of the internet with their beta MSNBot. I can't help but think what happened to Netscape might indeed happen to Google.
How does one go about getting information on a company like Google? I wouldn't even consider purchasing it until I could get some idea of its fundamentals. Frankly, with all of the euphoria that seems to accompany IPOs, I would be tempted to short it at some point :twisted: (except that I don't do that either).
Since they're private, Google isn't required to provide financials, so much of their figures are rumors. I do know they are doing very well with AdWords and are said to have over 100,000 advertisers, so I can't be sure. Part of any IPO filing would require them to post a ton of numbers. I have a feeling the numbers will be huge.
They aren't the only advertising network on the Internet. The idea is not that unique.
Here's a pretty good[url=http://www.fortune.com/fortune/technology/articles/0,15114,548765,00.html] link to a story[/url] on what is happening at Google.
I would trend away from this one. Maybe if its a *viable* publicly traded company in 5 years, I'll have a look. What is the auction idea all about? Why would the stock market officials let this company start trading different from anyone else? Sounds a little too weird me for to jump into head first..
I wouldn't buy stock in this stinker. 3 years ago the main search engine was Altavista. Then Infoseek. Where are they now? Google is not a portal. People don't check their email there or feel bonded. AOL and Yahoo will go from partners to competitors with the IPO. MSN, AOL and Yahoo trying to kick your butt is something to worry about. Google isn't a brand. They are all hype.
It just seems to me that the internet bubble isn't going to happen again. The crazy pricing of the 90's isn't going to be tolerated or inflated by todays investors. Why have they waited so long to do the IPO? Many other technology companies have been through the first bubble, saw it drop and are trying to recover through bankrupcy or other means. How is this company different?