« GICS 30: A PG Trade Tuesday, February 1, 2005 14:13:26 | Main | State of Mind, Thursday, February 3, 2005 05:22:26 »
February 2, 2005
GICS 45: Doubting GOOG, Wednesday, February 2, 2005 09:12:07
For the past six months I feel that Google has been raining on my parade. You see, I pride myself is sniffing out problems in capital markets, and Google represents to me the guy in the Sprint TV commercials with the forehead emblazoned with a message. In the case of GOOG, I see that message as Caveat Emptor.
I have spent a lifetime in public auditing and corporate finance. Readers know I verge on being a skeptic. It's hard for me to accept the blathering idiots on the sell-side who shout to the world that all's well.
Well, all's well that ends well, and in the case of GOOG, I don't hear the proverbial obese person singing. In fact, I question the prudence of money managers using Other People's Money (OPM) to buy up shares in GOOG at nose-bleed heights within a scenario that could end in a lot of wealth destruction.
Why am I concerned? Firstly, I already listed my reasons in past articles, mostly in Trader Wizard. The early evidence says I've been wrong and the Goldman Sachs tech analyst is right. So, let's not review that today.
Today I want to ask GOOG investors who are buying up the stock at these prices ($216 this morning in the pre-open), whether they truly understand what they are buying. I'd like to ask the Google external auditors if they really, truly, comprehend the company.
Here's what really bugs me with Google. I don't trust any company that says it can march to its own drummer. What does it have to hide?
Why does Wall Street expect a certain financial reporting protocol (non-GAAP) and Google management report on some other basis (GAAP)? How is it that Google re-stated their financial results last year? Do their internal accountants really know what's going on?
Does anybody really know what Google's revenue, and cost of revenue, is? And is that revenue stream solid " or is fake? Yes, fake!
I'm flat serious about this.
Google's metrics are supposedly explosive; but are they?
For months now I have been beside myself in anger at spam. There is a reason for spam. That is, there is a motivating force that underlies the fact spam is in our face. And I'm going to tell you what it is, and it happens to be related to Google, and it happens to be driving Google's metrics, as well as defrauding corporate advertisers who have to pay for every Google ad click-through.
I suspect the biggest fraud in the world is happening today, and Google is in the midst of it " not perpetrating this fraud, but enjoying its benefits nonetheless. And, when a company like Google is the recipient of ‘found money', they are likely to turn a blind eye until the corporations who are losing it start to complain and demand explanations.
Do you know that I haven't had a single spam on the new billcara.com website since I started it six weeks ago? It's true. Have you seen one Google ad on my pages? No! And I refuse because Google ads bring in the scum bags of the world forcing hits upon the pages of those bloggers and websites who use them (many of these bloggers allow it and even do it intentionally).
With Trader Wizard, you know I had Google ads. It was a way to have my web master paid, without having me to ante up for the computer service.
And you know I had been receiving comment spam about once every six minutes. You know it because I was screaming about it. It got so bad at TW that I had to shut the system off.
Everybody said to me at the time that I was going to lose my readers in switching to the new site. And when I started to take web stats on the new system I found they were half what I had been getting at TW. I asked my readers why, and I wrote up your responses. I even wrote that my new web master Mark Anderson told me he was happy with my almost 1,000 unique sessions per day because these were real, and my almost 2,000 unique sessions per day at TW included a lot of spam, so those results were unreal.
That got me to thinking how many hundreds of millions of dollars the advertisers to Google must be paying via fraud. And how many new blogs that are being built on an advertising model are simply fooling themselves to the reality that click fraud is really the name of their game.
Mark Anderson sent me an article yesterday, which you can get from the link below, but I decided to sleep on it before letting my emotions get to me and writing words I would probably later regret. It relates to something called "link spam" which the perpetrator says is legal, whereas Google ad click-through fraud is -- in his demented mind at least " the only kind of spam fraud.
The fact is I am Seeking Sam. I want you to help me find the "Sam" in the attached article because this scumbag needs to have Taser guns zapped into his eyes until he tells us just who are paying him to cause the pain, wealth destruction and criminal fraud behind spam.
It's always the guy who writes the checks who needs to be removed from society. People like Sam only do what they do because Mr. Big is paying them to do it. The little guys who are helping Mr. Big will always delude themselves into rationalizing their illicit dealings " but nonetheless know that they have to stay hiding in the shadows.
More than anything, we have to find Mr. Big.
Here's the article Mark Anderson sent to me. I hope it makes you as pissed off as it did me.
Now, why is it that I haven't had a single comment spam since I started billcara.com? Sam says I should have been receiving his link spam because I'm linked to many sites and have good traffic, while using MT. Well I'm not being affected by Sam, and that's because I cut off Google ads.
In summary, I think the investment world (and my readers) had better get a handle on link spam and click fraud before chasing the perfectly priced GOOG to the new Goldman Sachs target of $265.
Posted by Posted by Bill Cara on February 2, 2005 09:10:23 AM | Category: 45 Info Technology , Blogging World
Discourse
Watch out for Feb 14, 2005 as it's the end of lockup for 176.8 million shares of GOOG. There will likely be plenty of recommendations to "buy" in advance in hope of building support for those shares to be sold. (Of course, as the stock price drops, it'll be called minor profit taking and a good buying opportunity.) To play that potential downside, if March puts look expensive, limit your risk with a bear spread.
Posted by: RlzGain
at
February 2, 2005 12:01 PM [link]

The word fraud seems a bit strong to me. I have been thinking for a while that the popularity of blogs and the amount of web traffic related to them is ultimately going to drive down the value of a pageview. It is easy to generate clicks but tough to generate revenue from them. I don't know how efficiently the internet ad market is priced but I would just guess that given the way blogging and rssreaders are changing web habits, it would be easy to see it being way off at this moment in time.
At any rate Google has a very transparent bidding system to buy click-throughs and an equally transparent system to pay sites that display ads. While such a mispricing will effect their stock price it is way off from fraud. The goats in the game are really the people quitting their day jobs to make money off ads on their websites or the companies paying for the clicks.
Posted by: michael
at
February 2, 2005 10:07 AM [link]