HOMEPAGE
Competitor analysis
Quick and easy competitor analysis
Advertising, marketing and revenues
Make more money from advertising
Website speed, layout and use-ability
Improve the experience of those who visit your site.
Get your website started
Tips on how to get your website up and running for free
More links and FAQs
Links to great web resources and answers to frequently asked questions about how to improve your website.
ARTICLES
Read our original articles
-How to integrate Facebook with your website
3 simple ideas, including how to do it!
-What will happen to the internet over the next 10 years?
Will Google and Facebook fail? How will Internet TVs affect the technology landscape? What are the threats to today's giants?
-Identify your audience to increase ad revenue
Understand who visits your website to increase click through rates by optimising the type of adverts you show.
-Is Google bad for innovation, do they make too much money?
Google use their huge profits from advertising to start-up other businesses, but does this crowd out innovative competition?
Favourites:
How long does it take to set-up a website?
First steps to build a website?
What programming languages to use?
The best domain and webhost providers?
Google's excess success, making too much money.
Google is the most succesful internet based company. But what are they succesful at? Google makes most of it's money from advertising. They also provide numerous other services, including the android mobile phone software, shopping services, hosted web services, books etc.
But how can I even suggest Google is bad for innovation? They appear to have a great culture to help their employees, Google say "Our commitment to innovation depends on everyone being comfortable sharing ideas and opinions." Their offices have lava lamps, massage chairs, large inflatable balls, foosball, pool tables, volleyball courts, assorted video games, pianos, ping pong tables, and gyms that offer yoga and dance classes.
Sounds amazing - I bit of a Willy Wonka approach to innovation just without the Oompa-loompas.
So Google have a very succesful business, they attract fantastic talent and have a great culture to aid innovation of their employees.
Google even spends money on venture capital business, green businesses and have a philanthropic arm.
But there is fundemental risk with large corporations such as Google who use their huge profits in one area to fund business in other areas. There are three main reasons why Google may be bad for innovation.
1. Protection
Google can spend profits from it's advertising to protect it's business through advertising, brand building, developing products to compliment it's business (e.g. google webmaster tools, google analytics, google adwords and adsense) and purchasing complementary companies.
This all stifles competition, and makes it harded for new innovative businesses to emerge.
A key example of this is Google Plus (and previous social networking attempts such as Buzz). Google are protecting their advertising revenue by preventing Facebook from competing away advertising revenues. Google's problem is Facebook advertising is more powerful, as they have more information on the people who have adverts shown to them. So Google have solved this problem by launching social networking sites - the latest of which is Google Plus. Google Plus rocketed to over 20million users within a month of being open in 2011. Clearly this would be impossible for a new start-up to acheive, but Google are really pushing to protect their advertising revenue.
But is Google Plus really that innovative, or just a slightly different version of every other social networking website?
2. PeopleGoogle is a fantastic company to work for and attracts a lot of talent. It pays for this talent with the profits from it's advertising revenues, in order to develop the products which protects its business. These talented people are therefore prevented from starting up their own business, and being creative the non-Google way.
3. Picking winners
Part of the problem with Communist Governments were that they picked winners - the cars to produce, the amounts of food to produce, the products to develop from the huge sums of tax the government receives. Once a company becomes as big as Google (in fact, Google's value is larger than some countries GDP) it has the same problem. All this money from advertising gets reinvested in new ventures, which to a certain extent will be picked by the Google management (who you can liken to the ruling government). This isn't an efficient way to allocate capital, and may cause better but less well companies to not be as succesful.
Conclusion
I think Google is a fantastic company who do try to avoid the three points I make above. However, they generate so much profit from adverts that they will always struggle to effectively invest this money.
Read our article about what the future holds for the internet giants like google, and why they could fail in the future:What will happen to the internet over the next 10 years: Will Google and Facebook fail?
Improve News :
Disclaimer :
- Please note all the views in this article are my own, and in reality none of them may happen. I am not responsible for how you use this information, in particular, you cannot hold me responsible for any investment decisions. This article does not constitute investment advice, and should not be used in making decisions which could cause you or a third party a financial loss. I am not qualified to give financial advice. Although I have presented facts I believe to be true, these have not been independently verified, peer reviewer nor checked.