Google – is it Time to Short?

Everyone loves Google. Who could blame them? It’s the reason that I love the internet. I hated searching for things in the past because I could never find what I was looking for. That changed when I found Google. The company is really loved by the internet community and also by the share holders. I remember wanting to buy shares when they had their initial public offering, but $100 a share, were they crazy? Apparently not. They reached $475 a share and are currently at $376. I say it’s time to short google.

Google makes what? They don’t make anything. They sell advertising to people that want to sell products on sites and google.com. A vast majority of these people are regular people trying to make money with google. They advertise ebooks from clickbank and when someone clicks on the add they have to pay, but hopefully the person that clicks the ad will buy the ebook, so they make a profit.

Adsense is what people have on their site so that they make money for having google ads. Whenever someone clicks the ad they make money, while the advertiser loses it, and Google makes the most. This is where the problem is. Google is so huge that they can’t keep up with whoever makes fraudulent clicks. Even though they expressively say in the agreement that under no circumstances can anyone click on their own ad and that they track everything. It’s all a bluff. You could also get someone else to click the ad anyway. Does this remind you of anything?

When the world wide web was in it’s infancy there were a ton of websites that sold advertisments to people. I’m sure everyone remembers alladvantage. A site that gives you a bar to place at the bottom of your screen. It shows ads and pays you. It went bankrupt at the height of it’s membership. It’s wasn’t exactly the same as google, but there were ones that were. People got paid to put a logo or advertisment on their site and everytime someone clicked it the website owner would get paid. They all went bankrupt. So how is google doing the same exact thing and making money at it?

They get money when people advertise. They don’t lose money when people go bankrupt in their advertising. They just provide a means to advertise. In the sites that went bankrupt, if they didn’t make money on a click they would lose money. The problem is that the adsense people are cheating more and more, so advertisers are finding it less profitable to use google. The problem for the advertisers is that they really don’t have anywhere else to turn. Overture is too small. Google is fine for the most part, but the shareholders might have to worry. If Google doesn’t do more to prevent click fraud then more people are going to stop trying to make money using Google Adwords. I believe Google is as saturated as it’s going to be, advertisers are finding it less and less profitable and so are adsense providers. This will only get worse. My prediction is that Google is about to go south for the winter.