Ideas on how to become rich - How to become a billionaire, part 4
In the previous post, I explored how Sam Walton made his money and became very rich. In this post, I will be exploring two individuals who have been instrumental in helping make the world digitalised and in the process have made a lot of money and have become incredibly rich.
This article here examines Google, using Wikipedia as well as news reports as sources. First, we shall be looking at Google in general, although I suspect that many people already know how Google makes money and what the company does and such. Secondly, we shall be looking at the founders and their lives, and how they founded the company. In particular, Page and Brin.
However, in this case study on how to become a billionaire, I will not be giving any answers or giving any personal opinions or recommendations on how to become rich or how to become a billionaire - you can read the information below in the case study and figure out for yourself what it was that made these two individuals very rich and how they did, and you should be constantly asking yourself what ideas and what lessons can be take away from them? The theme of course is "how to become rich". Remember to ask yourself such questions as we explore this case study of Google - one of the best and biggest companies on earth currently.
Case study: Larry Page and Sergey Brin and their company, Google
Materials taken from Wikipedia, online sources, as well as newspaper reports, dated before 2008
What is Google? - a basic primer and basic introduction
Google Inc. is an American public corporation, earning revenue from advertising related to its Internet search, e-mail, online mapping, office productivity, social networking, and video sharing services as well as selling advertising-free versions of the same technologies.
Google was co-founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were students at Stanford University and the company was first incorporated as a privately held company on 4 September 1998. The initial public offering took place on 19 August 2004, raising US$1.67 billion, making it worth US$23 billion. Google has continued its growth through a series of new product developments, acquisitions, and partnerships.
Google began in January 1996, as a research project by Larry Page, who was soon joined by Sergey Brin, two Ph.D. students at Stanford University in California. They hypothesized that a search engine that analyzed the relationships between websites would produce better ranking of results than existing techniques, which ranked results according to the number of times the search term appeared on a page. Their search engine was originally nicknamed "BackRub" because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.
Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant web pages must be the most relevant pages associated with the search, Page and Brin tested their thesis as part of their studies, and laid the foundation for their search engine. The domain google.com was registered on 15 September 1997, and the company was incorporated as Google Inc. on 4 September 1998 at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California. The total initial investment raised for the new company amounted to almost US$1.1 million.
In March 1999, the company moved into offices in Palo Alto, home to several other noted Silicon Valley technology startups. After quickly outgrowing two other sites, the company leased a complex of buildings in Mountain View at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway from Silicon Graphics (SGI) in 2003. The company has remained at this location ever since, and the complex has since come to be known as the Googleplex. In 2006, Google bought the property from SGI for US$319 million.
The Google search engine attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet users, who liked its simple design and useful results. In 2000, Google began selling advertisements associated with search keywords. The ads were text-based to maintain an uncluttered page design and to maximize page loading speed. Keywords were sold based on a combination of price bid and clickthroughs, with bidding starting at US$.05 per click. This model of selling keyword advertising was pioneered by Goto.com (later renamed Overture Services, before being acquired by Yahoo! and rebranded as Yahoo! Search Marketing). Goto.com was an Idealab spin off created by Bill Gross, and was the first company to successfully provide a pay-for-placement search service. Overture Services later sued Google over alleged infringements of Overture's pay-per-click and bidding patents by Google's AdWords service. The case was settled out of court, with Google agreeing to issue shares of common stock to Yahoo! in exchange for a perpetual license. Thus, while many of its dot-com rivals failed in the new Internet marketplace, Google quietly rose in stature while generating revenue.
Google has created services and tools for the general public and business environment alike; including Web applications, advertising networks and solutions for businesses.
What are some of the money earners for this big company? They are:
How to become rich: Advertising
99% of Google's revenue is derived from its advertising programs. For the 2006 fiscal year, the company reported US$10.492 billion in total advertising revenues and only US$112 million in licensing and other revenues. Google is able to precisely track users' interests across affiliated sites using DoubleClick technology and Google Analytics. Google's advertisements carry a lower price tag when their human ad-rating team working around the world believes the ads improve the company's user experience. Google AdWords allows Web advertisers to display advertisements in Google's search results and the Google Content Network, through either a cost-per-click or cost-per-view scheme. Google AdSense website owners can also display adverts on their own site, and earn money every time ads are clicked.
How to become rich: Software
The Google web search engine is the company's most popular service. As of August 2007, Google is the most used search engine on the web with a 53.6% market share, ahead of Yahoo! (19.9%) and Live Search (12.9%). Google indexes billions of Web pages, so that users can search for the information they desire, through the use of keywords and operators, although at any given time it will only return a maximum of 1,000 results for any specific search query. Google has also employed the Web Search technology into other search services, including Image Search, Google News, the price comparison site Google Product Search, the interactive Usenet archive Google Groups, Google Maps, and more.
In 2004, Google launched its own free web-based e-mail service, known as Gmail. Gmail features conversation view, spam-filtering technology, capability to use Google technology to search e-mail. The service generates revenue by displaying advertisements and links from the AdWords service that are tailored to the choice of the user and/or content of the e-mail messages displayed on screen.
In early 2006, the company launched Google Video, which not only allows users to search and view freely available videos but also offers users and media publishers the ability to publish their content, including television shows on CBS, NBA basketball games, and music videos.
Google has also developed several desktop applications, including Google Desktop, Picasa, SketchUp and Google Earth, an interactive mapping program powered by satellite and aerial imagery that covers the vast majority of the planet. Google Earth is generally considered to be remarkably accurate and extremely detailed. Many major cities have such detailed images that one can zoom in close enough to see vehicles and pedestrians clearly. Consequently, there have been some concerns about national security implications; contention is that the software can be used to pinpoint with near-precision accuracy the physical location of critical infrastructure, commercial and residential buildings, bases, government agencies, and so on. However, the satellite images are not necessarily frequently updated, and all of them are available at no charge through other products and even government sources; the software simply makes accessing the information easier. A number of Indian state governments have raised concerns about the security risks posed by geographic details provided by Google Earth's satellite imaging.
Google has promoted their products in various ways. In London, Google Space was set-up in Heathrow Airport, showcasing several products, including Gmail, Google Earth and Picasa. Also, a similar page was launched for American college students, under the name College Life, Powered by Google.
How to become rich: The founders:
Larry Page is the son of the late Dr. Carl Victor Page, a professor of computer science and artificial intelligence at Michigan State University and one of the University of Michigan's first computer science Ph.D graduates, and Gloria Page, a computer programming teacher at Michigan State University. He is also the brother of Carl Victor Page, Jr. a co-founder of eGroups, later sold to Yahoo! for approximately half a billion dollars. Page attended a Montessori school in Lansing, Michigan, and graduated from East Lansing High School. Page holds a Bachelor of Science degree in computer engineering from the University of Michigan with honors and a Masters degree in Computer Science from Stanford University. At University of Michigan, Page was a member of the solar car team and served as the president of the HKN. After enrolling for a Ph.D. program in computer science at Stanford University, Page was in search for a dissertation theme and decided to explore the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge graph. His supervisor Terry Winograd agreed and Page focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, considering the number and nature of such backlinks to be valuable information about that page. In his research project, nicknamed "BackRub," he was soon joined by Sergey Brin, a fellow Stanford Ph.D. student and close friend, whom he had first met in the summer of 1995 in a group of potential new students which Brin had volunteered to show around the campus. To convert the backlink data gathered by BackRub's web crawler into a measure of importance for a given web page, Brin and Page developed the PageRank algorithm, and realized that it could be used to build a search engine far superior to existing ones. In August 1996 the initial version of Google was made available, still on the Stanford Web site.In 1998, Brin and Page founded Google, Inc. Page ran Google as co-president with Brin until 2001 when they hired Eric Schmidt to become Chairman and CEO of Google. According to the 2006 edition of Forbes, Page had an estimated net worth of $18.5 Billion, placing him at rank 26 on Forbes's list of the richest persons in the world, together with Brin.
Sergei Brin was born in Moscow, in the Soviet Union to a Jewish family. According to Google lore, Page and Brin "were not terribly fond of each other when they first met as Stanford University graduate students in computer science in 1995." They soon found a common interest: retrieving relevant information from large data sets. Together, the pair authored what is widely considered their seminal contribution, a paper entitled "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine." The paper has since gone on to become the tenth-most accessed scientific paper at Stanford University. Brin has appeared on television shows and many documentaries, including Charlie Rose, CNBC, and CNN. In 2004, he and Larry Page were named "Persons of the Week" by ABC World News Tonight. In January 2005 Sergey Brin was nominated to be one of the World Economic Forum's "Young Global Leaders." In 2007, Brin was cited by PC World as #1 on a list of the "50 most important people on the Web," along with Larry Page and Google CEO Eric Schmidt. He is also an investor in Tesla Motors, which is developing the Tesla Roadster, a 250-mile range battery electric vehicle.
You've been reading ideas on how to become rich from Google, and the founders Page and Brin. What ideas have you learnt on how to become rich and how to become a billionaire? These are the central questions that you may wish to ask yourself and remind yourself of.
More to come in future posts here on my ideas blog, where I explore various ideas on how to become rich, and in this series, how to become a billionaire in particular. Thanks for reading and cheers!
Ideas on how to become rich!
Ideas on how to become rich - How to become a billionaire, part 4
Ideas on how to become rich - How to become a billionaire, part 1
Ideas on how to become rich - How to become a billionaire, part 1
Welcome to this series on my ideas on how to become rich site. This series on my site is about how to become a billionaire, as promised earlier. I have done research into this field and will simplify my analysis and share some ideas about this topic. Then after this series, I should be writing more about investment and finance as usual, and probably have a series on how to make money on the stock market by borrowing ideas from fund manager Peter Lynch and his book "One Up on Wall Street", but that's all in the works and in the future. This series here is about "how to become a billionaire".
First up, my research methodology for researching on this important topic: regarding how to become a billionaire, the most obvious way seemed to me to have a look at Forbes list of billionaires and see how they made their money, where they got their sources on income and the like. And it shouldn't strike you as new or special or something innovative that all of them made their money in some field or other, and they are all billionaires because their companies are listed. Therefore, the question "how to become a billionaire" can be easily answered as "get listed on the stock market and do well there" (and with tongue in cheek, of course get listed on the stock market and do well there but not in a recession - get listed and make money when the stock market is doing well!). Clearly the direct correlation is between being a billionaire and having lots of stock, either in your own company or in Warren Buffett's case, in other companies. Thus this is not the answer we are looking for. We can definitely become billionaires if we have stocks in the right company and/or we own companies that are very successful, and we have stocks in those companies.
The focus will be on the fields that the billionaires are working in, what they do, and how they earn their money - because ultimately the stock price follows their companies' incomes and revenues. This is the main focus of "how to become a billionaire" - the ways in which the rich and famous earn their money, and how their companies made them rich.
Therefore the next step was for me to take a list of billionaires that I wanted to emulate and then observed how they made their money, and that was the basis of my case studies. However, in the case studies, those were rich men, and with the exceptions of Trump and Buffett, none of the others were billionaires, although they were millionaires. To summarise, in this series I correct my former case studies and now make instead a summary and a collation of various billionaires, but not on the billionaires themselves but on the way in which they made their money - in other words, their companies and what they did.
In summary: I will be writing on "how to become a billionaire". I looked at the list of billionaires and selected a few to research on. The focus was not on their stock price but instead on the ways and ideas in which they made their money and how their companies developed.
Some of the richest men and women got their money through court cases, lawsuits, and via inheritance. Those will not be considered here in my ideas site.
The billionaires that I looked at were:
Sam Walton of Wal Mart
Brin and Page of Google
(I got all their information off the internet, and as to the validity, well, I consulted Wikipedia... of all things)
Sergei Popov
Roman Abramovich - you all know this guy if you watch football, and by football I of course am referring to the English Premier League football!
Warren Buffett
Donald Trump
as well as
Jack Welch
Henry Ford
Thomas Edison - believe it or not!
among others
Therefore the main companies that we will be looking at are:
Wal Mart
Google
Berkshire Hathaway
Ford
General Motors
General Electric
We will learn how to become a billionaire from these companies and their founders, and basically this series is a case study series not of people and not of rich people, but superrich people and superrich and huge companies. In these times of 2008 and rapid economic change and problems in the international economy, it is important to learn what is timeless and what does not change - namely the skills of how to make money, the ideas behind the companies that make money, and the history of how some companies made it big and what we can learn from that. More to come here on my site on Ideas on how to become rich! Stay tuned, thanks for reading.
Ideas on how to become rich!
How to become rich making money online 2
How to become rich making money online 2
This will be a very long post here on how to make money online with a focus on either website building or blog building using advertisements, with google adsense. This is an introductory analysis and there will be more to come here on my website, and more in other related posts here on my ideas blog. As I have mentioned before, one can make money either via online surveys, doing up a website/ blog, and then also doing online business. The thing is that there are many ways to make money online but there are no guarantees as to your success.
Making money by running a website with advertisements and google adsense, and how it should be done: I have summarised the ideas of several websites, and am going to condense the information simply for you so that you can make up your own minds. There are two types of bloggers who make money online: one intends to be an A Lister, which apparently means a blogger who wants to design an excellent blog and attract social traffic. The second type of blogger is someone who wants to design a site based on something that he can sell, refer or do a product/ service for. This will enable him to make money via advertising, either through google adsense or through some other advertising service.
There are shopping ads, TLA, yahoo publishers and many other companies that offer advertising services, so be sure to check them out if you're interested. Always make sure you have many sources of income and don't just depend on one single source.
In any case, the social A lister blogger makes money via endorsements, advertising on his site, online advertisement companies and also because he can make a lot of money writing good articles that people want to read. The other blogger who depends primarily on advertisements does not want to be like the A lister, and instead depends on advertisements, referrals and offering products. The key difference is the approach taken. I will be doing further analysis in later posts, so you might want to learn whatever you can in the way of ideas on making money online and make up your own mind.
How does one make money online using google adsense? It's actually very simple to establish google adsense, although make money online from it is rather difficult if you are aiming for a lot.
Firstly, get a website or a blog, or some webpage that you have a lot of content on. Then get an account with google adsense, or any other company of your choice. They will provide you with a code, and then you attach this code into your website, and then you're done. Hence, the company, either google or the other online company of your choice, will send ads to your website, and target it at your content. The point is that you need original and new content if you want to do well, because either you won't get targeted advertisements, or you will not be able to have ads because you do not have the requisite content or requirements. After you have set up your website and your code, sit back and wait for money to come rolling in!
It is not that simple of course, because the next step is then increasing your traffic and getting more readers. To do that, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) becomes very important, and that has two parts: key words and backlinks, and is very technical. I will be analysing those two key elements in future posts under the heading SEO or Search Engine Optimisation.
As a word of caution, remember to listen and literally obey google's adsense policies! I myself adhere to these guidelines strongly because basically, he who pays the piper calls the tune. Google pays if you follow their policies closely and obey their every word, so just do as you're told and you'll do fine. This is a warning to those may intend to cheat, because I feel that there is no way to cheat a major technology company with global reach and very very strong search engines. I myself follow google's adsense policies, and I strongly suggest that if you decide to take up adsense you should do the same too.
If you know what SEO is, and you can raise traffic to your site which is serving targeted advertisements, you can now sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labour. The thing is to keep on writing good, nice articles that attract readers and buyers to your blog/ website. However, there are ways to become rich online using various methods. You would have to buy some products, such as one that would provide backlinks, provide page ranks, provide key words and ideas, and in some unethical cases, even provide articles. Yes, apparently you need the software to do all those things if you want to make it big making lots of money online, as it is not possible to do everything by hand or yourself. I recommend looking around the Internet if you're interested in an advanced "make money online" course.
I won't be covering underhand means of make money online in my blog, however, as my main emphasis is on legal ways of making money and becoming rich, and besides, investments, a sound job and a very good and stable income from many sources would make far more sense than depending on using underhand means of making money online. I don't believe that one should try to buy an article generator. That's my personal opinion.
But there are also legal ways of making your blog or your website more popular too, as well. But these are not really advanced tips, but more advanced than the basics I've just covered earlier in my post.
1. Write good articles.
2. Write often and write well!
3. Give some colours and graphics.
4. Let users post comments and their own ideas.
5. Get others to link you to their blogs/ websites.
6. Write to companies or write to online article submission directories.
7. Post your pictures, and please look handsome/ pretty! That would be a major advantage.
All the best, then! I do hope you can make money online.
(As an Economics aside: I would guess that this sort of economic analysis is rather important: The rise of online advertising and online industries, and how consumers play an important role in advancing online trade and online shopping. As long as there are companies that serve online ads, and as long as there are people willing to surf the Net in the search of online products, then to make money online is indeed possible. People must surf the Net and buy and order products from the Internet, and luckily for us, they do. Hence it means that there must be some form of traffic and Internet business before this kind of economic model can be successful. Due to the rise of online shopping, surfing and spending, this economic model can work well.)
