Google Stock Is In Downward Spiral
I hadn’t been paying much attention to this lately but right around Christmas I was starting to notice that Google’s stock was in a bit of a slump. Like the rest of the world who watches this type of thing, I think I was amazed at how the Goog’s stock seemed completely immune to anything around it. And all the time I kept thinking how things were back in the late nineties when everyone said there was no tech bubble and then all of a sudden, the world (i.e. Silicon Valley) was flush with casualties.
It wasn’t like I was predicting anything (not that anyone would listen or that I even had a forum to blabber on at the time) but it just seemed that something had to give at some point. Unless I’m mistaken, I seem to remember hearing that blowhard stock “guru” Jim Cramer saying something like Google will become the next Berkshire Hathaway. Never split the stock and in years to come it will be worth thousands of dollars per share.
Well Jimbo may still be right but from the high of about $732 bucks per share in November I believe, Google’s stock has plunged. Yes that is the word folks, PLUNGED, to a new low of about $432 on March 6.
A 40% decline in 5 months? Holy Recession Batman! Let’s get real here: With the economy slumping (I’m not one to tout a recession), and business suffering doesn’t it make sense that people (i.e. business) will spend less on advertising? And since Google’s entire business model is based on advertising……well, you figure it out.
I have always wondered how a company could base it’s sole income stream on ONE item which for the most part Google has done. Their Adwords and Adsense models make them billions of dollars. But that’s all they have. Okay, okay, so you’re saying, “Yeah, well GM, Ford, Toyota et al only have one item as well, cars.” Yeah, but they have a lot of cars. When gas was cheap(er) and nobody gave a damn, SUV’s were huge moneymakers. The profit margins were huge on these gas guzzlers. When gas started rising, and the SUV sales took a dive, they ramped up the more fuel efficient smaller vehicles.
What does Goog have to prop it up? I wonder.
Look, I think what they’ve done is amazing. Hell, I use Adsense on every website I own so I’m not complaining. But a couple questions come to mind:
1 - If Google’s stock continues this downward trend, will they still be able to recruit the best and brightest with stock option promises?
2 - How does this effect the mindset of someone working at G who right now has options that are worthless?
I have no doubt Google will remain strong and Microsoft/Yahoo notwithstanding, probably the leader in search for the foreseeable future. But it is amazing to me how the recent past keeps getting forgotten time and time again.
My failed attempt at ringtones and Youtube
Before I even get into this post, I wanted to make it very clear to anyone reading that a lot of the methods I post here at The Bucks Report are not original to me. In fact, by the time I see them and try them they’ve often been so abused as to be of no use to newbies like myself.
But I want to post them anyway to share my experience and thoughts so that they might help you guys out. Who knows, I might find something over at DP or BHW and give it a try only to fail (such as this method I’ll talk about) but you might be able to tweak it in a way to make a few bucks for yourself.
So this method was being kicked around at BHW and I’m sure numerous other forums and blogs. I actually first saw it over at Cash Tactics. A very cool blog that has some great tips. What it involves is using Youtube to generate traffic to your ringtone affiliate offer. Basically here’s how this tactic works: You find a handful of current videos from major music artists. Let’s say Timbaland, Daughtry, Foo Fighters, Snoop..whomever you chose.
Your next step is to download these videos onto your own computer. There are numerous ways to do this but I purchased a cool piece of software called Ultraget Video Downloader . This allows you to download Youtube (or other) videos that you normally wouldn’t be able to.
Okay, so now you have your videos. Your next step is to watermark them using something like Video Watermark Factory . What you want to do is watermark the video of (for instance) Alicia Keyes with something along the lines of “Get This Ringtone at http://www.youraffiliatecodehere.com”
Of course, the url is actually to your ringtone offer landing page that you have. I used a redirect so my CPA network would not know where my traffic was coming from. Your final step is to upload your new, watermarked video to numerous video sites. There are many to chose from. Again, to make matters easy, I purchased Video Post Robot which allows me to post any number of videos to a large number of video sites quickly.
Once you accomplish all of this, the goal is for someone to see your video that has your ringtone url and think to themselves, “Oh, hey, cool…I’ll go there and grab the Alicia Keys ringtone.” They sign up and you get your cut.
My results? Utterly pathetic. A total failure. Every single time I tried to upload the video to one of the sites using Video Post Robot, my watermarked video was deleted, almost immediately, due to copyright infringement. I made a grand total of ZERO dollars.
So what lesson did I learn if any? I imagine part of the problem was that I was using newly created accounts on all the video services. I believe that since it was an account just created and my first upload was of this type, it was caught immediately. Maybe if I’d used my old Youtube account that I’ve had for a couple of years I might have had the videos stay online for a longer period.
Second, I’m thinking I could have grabbed any number of videos of these same artists that were merely someone elses. In other words, rather than use the official Daughtry video, I could have found a video that some Daughtry groupie/lover made for their friends and watermarked that one. Who knows.
At any rate, it might be worth trying again but I have more than enough on my plate as it is with other…ahem….sneaky tactics in other areas that keep me more than busy and more than enough cash coming in. But if any of this works for anyone else, then it’s all good. Even if you don’t use it for this purpose, those three video links are great things to have. None of them are using any kind of affiliate link on my part.