The net worth of Google and its founders

[Voltron87]

I keep hearing about how the two guys who started Google are billionaires now. Did they sell Google? Where does this money come from? I just don't get how someone can turn a free service into billions. I guess they have ads on the site, but anyone really know?

[Jakesta]

IPO? That's my guess where they got it from. Google was an overpriced IPO, and Sergei and the other dude got a ton of $ from it.

So, yes, in essence, they did sell Google(part of it anyway).

[Ulysses]

GOOG (http://www.google.com/search?q=goog&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official)

[Voltron87]

So somebody bought Google? Why is it valuable? Why would people invest in it?

[bisonbison]

Dear god man, your brain is not just for storing baseball statistics and porn site addresses.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=why+is+google+profitable%3F

[Voltron87]

Ahh, the irony of being sent to google to answer my question...

[bisonbison]

Yeah, effort sure is a sonofabitch.

[Voltron87]

I read most of the links on that search page, theyre all really vague. They all say google is profitable in a slightly different flavor, but don't really get specific.

[mmbt0ne]

</font><blockquote><font class="small">En réponse à:</font><hr />
Yeah, effort sure is a sonofabitch.

[/ QUOTE ]

Put on a happy face, you're repping your company.

[bisonbison]

Put on a happy face, you're repping your company.

Oh, I'm smiling.

To those not able to figure it out, the profitability gist is this: Google provides targetted advertising.

That's it.

[Voltron87]

Do you mean the results of searches are juiced to come up with certain sponsors on top? Other than the obvious ads at the right side.

[bisonbison]

Do you mean the results of searches are juiced to come up with certain sponsors on top?

No.

Other than the obvious ads at the right side.

Yeah, those ads = a vast amount of money.

[CrashPat]

Lets see, it is the most sucessful search engine in history and has targetted advertising on every search. In addition it has placed targetted text ads on millions of pages hosted by others, and has rairly failed at any of its business endeavors. Gmail anyone?

Its IPO was worth a couple billion with stock starting at 80 bucks, it now sits around 250.

Basically they have something that everybody wants.

[1800GAMBLER]

Google, Inc. provides Web search and online advertising services on the Internet. It offers advertising solutions and global Internet search solutions through its Web site, and Intranet solutions via an enterprise search appliance. The company’s products and services include Google.com, Google AdWords, Google AdSense, and Google Search Appliance. Its Google AdWords program is used by advertisers to promote their products and services on the Web with targeted advertising. The company’s Google AdSense program is used by the third party Web sites to deliver ads relevant to the content on their sites. It also provides enterprise search appliances to search corporate systems through the Google Search Appliance. In addition, the company provides email services through Gmail, which offers a gigabyte of free storage for each user along with email search capabilities and relevant advertising. Google was co-founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998, and is headquartered in Mountain View, California.

They make a lot from me too /images/graemlins/frown.gif

[cbfair]

Adwords alone is a huge revenue generator, but there are many others (see 1800GAMBLER's post). Just search google for any word in the dictionary, chances are someone has specifically selected that word or combination of words and bid (auction style) to have their word closer to the top. The ad with the highest score (combining high bid and number of clicks, or popularity) is the ad posted closest to the top of the page.

Everytime one of those links is clicked, the bidder is charged for the service up to a preset monthly budget. Once your budget is spent, the ads no longer appear.

I used to do marketing for a small company and we set a monthly budget of $500 for the month, our quota was reliably reached by the third week of the month. After several months we noticed our web sales had risen dramatically since instituting adwords; We soon doubled the monthly budget. We were one of Google's smallest clients out of hundreds of thousands.

Here's (http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/facts.html) a quick stat sheet about the company.

[scotty34]

Whatever happened to that program that Google was developing that would work on your hard drive? Instead of using the crappy search feature that comes with Windows, Google was apparently developing a very elaborate one. Is this on the market yet - does anyone have it, and how good is it?

[shadow29]

http://desktop.google.com/