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Mark Cuban's Plan To Kill Google
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?"
I know bribery is accepted practice in the US but here in the EU it is still frowned upon.
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Is it worth $1 million to leave Google? I'm guessing most of the sites would say no, that's incredibly short sighted.
I'll give the top 1000 folks on slashdot who eat bread a nickel never to eat it again.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
They are surely a top-1000 site. Will they get the cash to de-list themselves?
P.S. The guy is an idiot. People go to Google not to get stuff from a top-1000 site, but to find stuff that is not found in the search bars of the top-1000 sites.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
What TFA is short on is any sense of motivation on Mark Cuban's part. Why does he want to do this? Did Google frighten him when he was a baby?
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
The top 1000 clients of google likely piss away a million $ a day in coffee alone.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
Does the dude have stock at Microsoft? Or what's it to him?
1 million is peanuts. Amazon, one of the top 100 sites, makes that during a coffee break.
Why opt out of free product placement (Amazon usually ranks high in google) worldwide, for a pittance?
Cuban's mojo has left the room.
Even if the "top 1000" sites accepted the bribe, that wouldn't make much of a dent. How small does this pilgrim think the internet is?
And what's to stop Google from re-indexing them?
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For the top 1000, a million bucks is not a lot of money. Why risk alienating the population for what is to them a drop in the bucket?
The phrase tortious interference comes to mind (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference)
This won't affect me. I don't search for advertisers. In fact, getting rid of the paid cruft will make searching for true results even better. Besides, a billion dollars is starting to fade into the noise of google's net worth. It may hurt Google, but it won't kill Google.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Yes, someone really should have a stern talking to of the CEO of Microsoft, Mark Cuban. ~
In all seriousness, can you please abandon your Slashdot ID and not post here again? And also, please leave the internet.
Thanks.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
...and I think the top 1,000 sites would easily calculate that their losses in ad revenue and web traffic would be worth more than $1,000,000.
This is simple, complete rubbish, spoken by a fool. One million dollars would be nowhere near enough for any profitable site to take itself off the world's biggest search engine, effectively killing future growth.
Also, assuming these sites aren't in competition with google directly, and most websites aren't, why would they care about trying to knock down Google, for a trivial sum?
That's it, today is the day I give up on slashdot. Bye.
Wow what a testament to Google. Mark Cuban is basically saying that nobody has a product that could even hope of competing with Google and the only way to conceivably take them down is to bribe their clients with gobs of money.
So, is he offering this out of his own pocket? (a billion dollars).
Or is this just a hare-brained idea that he is tossing out there to get some spin on his own name.
Let's see the Dallas Mavericks remove themselves from anything Google first. Oh, that's right, he must have already, never heard of the team before...
Tisha Hayes
Really? Spending one BILLION/MILLIARD dollars for what is essentially an advertising campaign? Sounds pretty risky to me. If you have that kind of money to gamble with, why not spend that money on actually building a better search engine?
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
I guess I should file this under Mark Cuban's plan to defeat Barack Obama, Mark Cuban's plan to dominate basketball, Mark Cuban's plan to dominate HD television content, and Mark Cuban's plan to destroy theatrical motion picture distribution.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
If the top 1000 sites left google...would anyone notice? the answer is yes..the next 1000 that would replace them..and my guess is there are a couple that would stay in the top 1000 after getting the exposure even if the others came back.
I Need someone to rebuild a Digitech Digital Delay pedal for me....for me...for me...for me.
From wikipedia: "In 1982, Cuban moved to Dallas, Texas. Cuban first found work as a bartender,[13][14] then as a salesperson for Your Business Software, one of the first PC software retailers in Dallas. He was terminated less than a year later, after meeting with a client to procure new business instead of opening the store.
Cuban started a company, MicroSolutions, with support from his previous customers from Your Business Software. MicroSolutions was initially a system integrator and software reseller. The company was an early proponent of technologies such as Carbon Copy, Lotus Notes, and CompuServe.[15] One of the company's largest clients was Perot Systems.[16] In 1990, Cuban sold MicroSolutions to CompuServe--then a subsidiary of H&R Block--for $6 million.[17] He retained approximately $2 million after taxes on the deal.[18]
In 1995, Cuban and fellow Indiana University alumnus Todd Wagner started Audionet, combining their mutual interest in college basketball and webcasting. With a single server and ISDN line[19], Audionet became Broadcast.com in 1998. By 1999, Broadcast.com had grown to 330 employees and $13.5 million in revenue for the second quarter.[20] In 1999, during the Dot-com boom, Broadcast.com was acquired by Yahoo! for $5.9 billion in Yahoo! stock.[21]"
This man is not a business genius. He is a good self-promoter, and has leveraged this to making a lot of money. Re-read the last couple sentences. he had a business with 13.5 million in revenue in 3 months (not profit... with 330 employees, it was much, much lower). He then sold it for likely a 500+ P/E ratio.
The tech stock market bubble made this man. I don't disparage him for that. However, any business advice coming from this man is virtually worthless. Self-promotion... he's up there.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
That top 1000 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.
**TODO** Steal someone elses sig.
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.
'This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it' - Eeyore
$1M isn't peanuts to everybody. The regular public can't see Google's site rankings, but assuming they're similar to the Alexa rankings, there are some sites that would probably jump at a million dollars. The porn sites, a lot of the bloggers, and some of the shakier social networking sites would probably take the money and run.
But there's something else odd about that list. Many of the top-ranked sites -- 3 of the first 20, for example -- are Microsoft. Again, that's not Google's ranking page, but MS sites are still findable via Google. If MS plans to 'kill' Google, shouldn't they start by taking their own sites off that search engine first?
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You know, because 10 minutes after they left the Google index, they're not top-1000 sites anymore.
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Umm, he owns HDNet AND he sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo to become a billionaire.
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 (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.
Goo goo g'joob.
... but if he's going to just throw a billion dollars away, why doesn't he do something decent with it like feed the poor or cure a disease or give computers to schools or fund music programs?
Or start a new business to help America get its shit together and beat this recession?
Thousand and million have always been the same in the US and UK, and the British billion has just about died about in the UK, sadly -- 'billion' means 'thousand million' to us these days, just like it does for you.
It's a pity, as I did like the name 'milliard' for a thousand million (a billion used to be a million million), but I suppose the gain in consistency is worth it.
How about you start using metric measurements in return? :)
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Before Microsoft tries to take over from the most successful search engine in the world they really need to get a better name. Can you really imagine youself using "bing" as a verb in mixed company?
The person who came up with that name must be the same one who thought it was a good idea to sell devices that allow you to "squirt" pictures of your kids.
I wonder if they will give themselves $1 million to take their own team off Google.
/me SLAPS Mark Cuban with a giant trout!
Wow! Look who the first result is for!?!? Mark Cuban's teams website! Shame Shame!!
http://tinyurl.com/yefvopu
Maybe it's not a bad idea after all, if he can get every website off google except his own, then then no matter what you search for, Google will only return the Mavs website as a result!!
I always said you'd have to pay me to use Bing. How about bribing 1 million heavy users with $1000 to switch and evangalize about it? That's one epic astroturf right there.
Nice to know our richest people fail at finding uses for their spare cash that actually benefit the human civilization.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
thanks for correcting your previous post, but not only does Microsoft have lots more cash than Google ($37.5B) but it is generated primarily through its Windows operating system/application sales.
If there is a battle over the search market and Google starts losing significant market share, its revenues are under direct threat. Microsoft's revenues are not. Basically you are cutting off Google's supply lines (to use a war analogy). So as the fight goes on Google will get weaker.
Of course, this is the long-term strategy that Google has been working on against Microsoft with (free) web based applications and now the Google Chrome operating system. But people are very reluctant to change OS's and applications whereas they are likely to quickly shift to another search engine.
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 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.
Looking at Mark Cuban's robots.txt file ( http://blogmaverick.com/robots.txt ), I see that he's not blocking Googlebot. Therefore, he is listed in Google's index. So why should someone take $1 million from him to leave the Google index when he clearly does not want to leave Google's index himself?
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Maybe a better analysis:
Mark Cuban was sitting around one day smoking something and wondered, "How can I prove that I am really, really stupid?"
Oh, I know. Wow! I've got it. Microsoft could pay a billion dollars to prove to everyone that it can't compete, that it has to pay to get results. Why the advertising alone would be worth 50 billion. Everyone would associate Microsoft with puking.
You take the million, fine ... but what about next year? Do you get another million, or was this a one-shot deal, in which case a million is nowhere near enough to permanently remove a top-1000 site.
Plus, what's to stop them from making another site with a similar name, and making the bing link redirect to the new site? New site is now at the top of both, with an extra $1m in their pocket.
Wow, this idea is almost as brilliant as bing. Why do people want to punish success? And why help m$? Google may dominate search, but m$ is still bigger, richer, & more powerful, right? Or not?
Let's just look at the top 50 sites to get an idea of the feasibility of this plan, as reported by Alexa.
First, we filter out all of the Google properties. By my count, that leaves 30.
Next, filter out Microsoft's properties, as the scheme would put theme in the antitrust crosshairs: That leaves 26.
Forget Yahoo; they make a lot more than $1MM annually from Google. We're down to 22.
What's left? Forget LinkedIn -- search results are their bread-and-butter. Likewise the IMDb, Craigslist, Twitter, eBay and Myspace. Wikipedia and the BBC would consider it a breach of their charters. Facebook might be tempted, but their users would protest too much. Only 13 out of 50 remain. Of these, which would play ball? RapidShare would -- they're rather be ignored by search traffic. The Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Turkish social networking sites might. Likewise the porn sites. In truth though, we have only five or six "maybes" in the top 50.
Bottom line, it's an absurd notion -- more old media fantasies of crippling the internet with blunt 19th century methods. I'm not saying that Google is unassailable, but a challenge by a competitor who hasn't put in the sweat-equity is a guaranteed to failure.
Google can just pay them a $million each to come back. Or $1.5 million. Google's a lot richer than Mark Cuban is.
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Who is Mark Cuban? I cannot seem to find him via Google...
The "Top 1000" sites are the ones I don't bother searching for: google, microsoft, yahoo, salon, nytimes, espn, amazon: I already know what they are. You use a search engine to search for stuff you can't find.
I was just reading about Order of Succession. Lacking a papal bull to assert otherwise, this post is the legitimate heir to the bastard son of an anonymous coward, who had a notion but failed to make an assertion. I would have liked social studies a lot more if we had done a comparative survey of succession methods (such as Tanistry) with the British Isles providing the case studies in strife and dysfunction. "For today's lesson in the optics of legitimate conception, we turn again to the British Isles."
From what I can see, tortious interference doesn't kick in until there is breach of contract. Nor am I aware of anything in law against forming market partnerships short of exploiting monopoly powers.
This whole thread, people seem not to get the point: if content is king, there's no reason why the owners of content shouldn't engage in a coordination game to protect their collective interests. It's not obvious that the search engine middle people should have gained the dominant economic hand.
The key phrase here being "if content is king". The content owners would like to think so, but the internet says otherwise: there is a heck of a lot of base load in pornography, drugs, and Asian merchandise. The government can bulk relocate the top 1000 street corner drug dealers in LA to the Chino human storage facility and it would dent the drug supply for weeks, or maybe even days or hours. There is also the long tail, user created content not yet aggregated at a major social networking site, and the content formerly known as knowledge.
Against this you have the cultural lock-in of impressionable young adults, and baby boomers who haven't yet figured out that if Elvis is still alive, he's probably fatter than Marlin Brando and creepier than Howard Hughs (who disappeared from sight for a good while himself).
There is also highly precarious tier of mass-market content manufactured against the better post-evolutionary judgement of its customer base. The macro breweries became successful, in part, because they managed to make the taste of a good beer a dim memory. Similarly, news products are continually debased, and rely more on customer momentum than choice opportunities.
It's extremely dangerous for a mass-market success story which has invested billions of dollars lulling their primary market to sleep on quality issues to introduce a choice event into the marketplace. It could be that some people discover that Google without many of the current top 1000 sites actually returns more interesting search results, as an acquired taste, given a fifteen minute taste test. Who knew?
There are more precarious market gorillas out there than people think. Cigarettes make women ugly at a younger age. Natural Coke and Pepsi make you obese. The holy trinity of corn/soy/sodium are an express train to the afterlife. Sports are the life obsession of the politically disenfranchised (for myself, hockey scores improve my minutes, while destroying my hours and days). The tripe on most news services actively sabotages attention span and issue comprehension. Duff Beer does not make you sexy. The seven never-fail sex tips of an airbrushed super model is not going to save your marriage (if the male sexual response proved too subtle to master in private study).
You can't just randomly yank the chain on these captive markets without risk of waking your customers up. There was a story here a few days ago about intelligence: many people have it, few use it. Requires effort. It's less effort to delegate to the lower brain functions, as shaped by evolutionary psychology that outlived its crown. Mmmm beer. Mmmm donuts. Mmmm bacon.
What gives the marketers an orgasm is the old joke "Whenever I feel like exercise, I lie down until the feeling passes." This is the reflex they relentle
You are so right...
Mark Cuban is an idiot, and the only reason he has money is that he managed to find an even bigger idiot at Yahoo to approve the acquisition of broadcast.com. Though I guess you have to give him some credit for that...
They ought to change title to
Mark Cuban's plan to kill top 1000 web sites
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra