Mark Cuban's Plan To Kill Google 773
rsmiller510 writes "Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, has a plan to kill Google by paying the top 1,000 sites a cool million each to leave the Google index and move to Microsoft. But could such a plan ever work, and would it be worth the risk to abandon Google?"
Who would notice? (Score:3, Informative)
Top 1000 examples: (Score:3, Informative)
That top 1000 [alexa.com] would include:
All of whom would see an immediate drop in revenues if google stopped indexing them, and some of which are actually google owned.
Re:So, the question is... (Score:5, Informative)
The real question is, who would be stupid enough to listen to a man who made almost all of his money soley on the chance decision of buying the domain name "Broadcast.com" and convincing Yahoo! that it was work ~$6 billion dollars to buy out.
Calm down, y'all (Score:5, Informative)
TFA makes it pretty clear that this (on his personal blog) is a thought experiment, not an actual plan he has any intention to follow through. More, he is speculating about moves that Microsoft or others might take to bring Google down and what that would do to the market.
Frankly, it as much use as mine our your random musings on business: the only motivation for it making the Slashdot front page seems to be that this guy coincidentally happens to have a billion dollars.
Re:Motivation? (Score:5, Informative)
Why in the world does the summary list to some stupid guys take on Mark Cubans blog post instead of the actual post?
http://blogmaverick.com/2009/11/13/google-murdoch-madoff/ [blogmaverick.com]
Not that it answers any of your questions, other than maybe he is a publicity hound.
Re:So, the question is... (Score:5, Informative)
P.S. In case anyone thinks that his $6 billion jackpot somehow displayed hidden skill or insight, I also point out that he's currently worth a little over $2 billion. That's right, he's lost $4 billion in networth since being bought out by Yahoo!
Re:wow, a whole million? (Score:5, Informative)
Technical level is easy: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156412 [google.com]
Re:Can he even afford it? Do sites even care? (Score:3, Informative)
On the other hand, for loser websites ranked 987th, it might be interesting, but would them off Google make any difference? Hell no it won't. Nobody would ever notice, except maybe the webmaster.
I think you're severely underestimating the size of the sites in the top 1000.
I'm not sure how accurate this ranking is [netlingo.com] (and it cuts off at 973, for some reason), but the bottom 100 there include sites like Target, Best Buy, Delta Airlines, Air France, and the New York Post - large retailers, airlines with high traffic, and big newspapers. I don't think any of those sites would accept the money to be removed from the listings - even at that level, it's still not worth it.
Re:wow, a whole million? (Score:5, Informative)
Sigh. I know it's waaay too much to ask, but if you actually read his blog post [blogmaverick.com] it's not a plan at all - just some ideas that he's throwing around. The headline in TFA (and thence TFS) is misleading.
Re:So, the question is... (Score:5, Informative)
First, It was $6B of Yahoo Stock, not $6B cash. I'm sure there are laws on how much you can sell and when.
From Broadcast.com's Wiki.
The record IPO made instant financial successes out of the company's employees through stock options, making 100 employees millionaires on paper (although most of them were unable to exercise their options and sell their shares before the stock price dropped) and founders Cuban and Wagner billionaires.
Second, it may have been 'pure luck' it doesn't look like this was his only venture into entrepreneurial endeavors.
Finally, that's still $2B dollars. From what I've read and the brief interaction in the time I met him (IU vs Purdue Alumni Rugby Match. Flew up in his personal Jet.) He has to be hands down one of the coolest Billionaires I've heard of.
He supported Grokster in the MGM vs Grokster case. He buys random companies and starts random websites. Like bailoutsleuth "a grassroots, online portal for oversight over the US government's $700 billion dollar "bailout" of financial institutions."
Not to mention he spouts off to NBA refs and other players. And shrugs his shoulder when they fine him. "Cuban has been fined by the NBA, mostly for critical statements about the league and referees, at least $1,665,000 for 13 incidents". (Matching each fine with a donation to a Charity). When he said something against Dairy Queen, he voluntarily worked at a DQ for a day.
You can't honestly tell me if you came up with some idea (no matter how stupid) and convinced someone to buy it at the height of a bubble. You wouldn't take your billions and have a ball. Spending the rest of your life drinking, flying around in your jet, yelling at professional sports officials, supporting any cause you thought was cool.
Hell. You could have a "Chyeld Day" on slashdot. Pay off Taco to change banner at the top for a few million.
Re:Bribery (Score:3, Informative)
You believe the people who run TPB are getting rich from it?
Re:Bribery (Score:5, Informative)
If this Mark Cuban person has a love affair with Microsoft, then it's the sort of love affair where Microsoft is deeply embarrassed about their drunken one night stand and desperately wishes the other party would shut up about it. Honestly, this is terrible publicity for Microsoft: "Come to us - we're so bad that people have to be paid not to use our competitors". As if any of these big sites would accept such a bribe anyway. I'm fairly sure this wouldn't be legal in the EU either so unless these great big companies have no presence in the EU (yeah right), then the deal would be complicated anyway.
Bing is actually fine. Its problem is that Google is already there and is so successful that their name has become a verb. Displacing that is going to take either very long term and sustained effort or some sort of PR disaster for Google (maybe their search engine is powered by Puppy juice). Bing needs a boost of some sort for certain. Pairing up with Wolfram Alpha is a good thing. Stunts like this (I sincerely hope MS had the sense not to okay this) are sooooooo not a good thing.
Muppet!
Fundamentally unsound business strategy (Score:3, Informative)
Any business strategy that boils down to "kill off competitor X" is fundamentally unsound in this type of open market. Michael Wolff, in his recent Vanity Fair article [vanityfair.com] on Rupert Murdoch's troubles succeeding on the internet, stated the issue well:
To view any of Google's markets as zero-sum is fundamentally myopic, and plays to Google's advantage. Any competitor is better served identifying something that Google doesn't do well for the customer, and focusing on that instead of taking market share away from Google. Of course, this requires real work and innovation.
Re:Bribery (Score:3, Informative)
Considering that for 1Mil, I could live very happily for 10+ years without working (at my current standard of living), or 5+ years as a very happy indulgent moron, then yes, I would take it. But if I was in the top 1000 companies indexed on Google, I wouldn't take it, since A) I'm not an "I" but a company, B) 1Mil isn't much money for these behemoths, and probably not worth the millions in lost business, C) Microsoft is involved, and D) there might be hidden legal problems involved that my shareholders wouldn't like.
Re:Bribery (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, that's not necessarily the marketer's dream. Kleenex and Xerox have also had headaches because when the name becomes that ubiquitous, you have some issues keeping the rights to it. If the courts decide that your name has become a generic word, then you're in trouble in terms of legal enforcement of your trademark. Xerox in particular has discouraged people from using 'xerox' as a verb, because they're concerned about losing the trademark. From their own website's company factbook [xerox.com], italic emphasis mine:
The Xerox Trademark
Xerox is a famous trademark and trade name. Xerox as a trademark is properly used only as a brand name to identify the company's products and services. The Xerox trademark should always be used as a proper adjective followed by the generic name of the product: e.g., Xerox printer. The Xerox trademark should never be used as a verb. The trade name Xerox is an abbreviation for the company's full legal name: Xerox Corporation.
XEROX is a registered trademark of Xerox Corporation.
Wikipedia has a little information on this, too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox#Trademark [wikipedia.org]
Re:Bribery (Score:2, Informative)
Run a search on TBP profit & turnover. Regardless of the inflated claims by the prosecution, even the chaps running it have boasted about the millions in annual takings.
Re:Bribery (Score:3, Informative)
Can a site go to Google and say 'please don't index me?' They can add a robots.txt thing, but they'll still be in the index, they just won't get new entries added.
Yep -- a meta tag with name="robots" and content="noindex" will (supposedly) cause Google to drop the page from its index. Once all the pages are gone from the index, robots.txt-blocking the crawlers will stop Google from keeping the URLs around as well.
Re:Bribery (Score:4, Informative)
append your search queries with "-experts echange", problem solved. Well, it solved it for me, YMMV.
Re:Bribery (Score:2, Informative)
Remove the top 1000 sites from Google, and another top 1000 will replace them.
im sorry but thats not the most thought out statement i've heard today. if you remove the top 1000 sites from Google then, yes, inherently you will have a new top 1000. the point of what Mark Cuban is trying to do, is remove the quality from Google.
Say for example, they remove ebay, amazon, and craigslist. Now using google, you'll never get a search result from those three websites.
So now when you search for used electronics, used books, or used flesh you'll get crappy websites that dont have the network economies, economies of scale, trust, etc. etc. etc.
its not like the top 1000 cease existing, its just that you cant use google to get to them. which makes google...worthless (and that the point)
Re:So, the question is... (Score:4, Informative)
Not to mention he spouts off to NBA refs and other players.
And their mothers http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/playoffs/2009/news/story?id=4157481 [go.com]
He's an attention whore with no class (and that is true regardless of what one things of Kenyon Martin or his mother).