As our PPC revenues continue to decline, today comes the news that Google is going to give everyone of their 23,000+ employees at least a 10% raise come January 1, 2011.
According to the BusinessInsider.com, not only will every Google employee receive a raise but each will receive a Tax Free $1,000 end of year bonus.
Tax free in that Google will pay the taxes that each employee would owe on the $1K bonus.
According to the author of the story the legendary Henry Blodget:
“Google will also give each employee an additional raise equivalent to 1X the employee’s target bonus for the year. And employees will be eligible for additional “merit increases” based on their individual performance.”
“and while $1,000 tax free isn’t much, spread across 20,000 employees, it’s costing the company $20 million.”
“A 10+% raise on a total cost base of $20 billion, meanwhile, will probably cost the company $1 billion a year”
Coming off a blow out quarter of earnings, its great that their employees are being rewarded, however domainers revenues still continue to decline.
Now with increased labor costs, I wouldn’t expect to see any jump up in domainers income.
I personally wouldn’t give an employee raise if I were them.
But at the same time Google domain revenue does not continue to decline like you say. I guess it is some sort of trend now to just keep saying that for years to come.
PS
If your revenue declines, perhaps you should move your domains to some other parking company. 😉
Matt
Google is the upstream partner so at the end of the day all parking companies are effected if Google is spending more of the money in house.
The other choice is the new Bing/Yahoo combo which I’m not hearing great results from domainers on.
It’s not that Google revenue (or should I say CPC) declines. It’s that your parking revenue declines. That’s the problem. It is hard to distinguish those usually as a domainer. But there are many reasons for the drop in overall revenue. I can probably like 30 things over the lats 3 years but I will save my breath. The important thing to know is that overall revenue has dropped, but not really Google CPC itself.
But I do agree with the Google employee issue. There’s better ways to spend that and make the employees happier at the same time.
Throwing money is never a good idea. Begins to show lack of creativity. Which could be bad for the company.
we all work for google… where’s my raise?
Google is having a great year and that’s what you do you reward your employees. Better ways to reward employees ? Their employees are happy and have many perks like 7 Gourmet chefs who make their lunch every day. Google employs 22,000 people worldwide and 12,000 of them work in its Mountain View headquarters. All Google employees get free lunch, unregulated working hours, massage at work, all kinds of toys at office campus and tons of other fantastic benefits.
RH
I think its great that Google is rewarding its employees.
I just wish they also rewarded the one’s sending the traffic to them.
“As our PPC revenues continue to decline, today comes the news that Google is going to give everyone of their 23,000+ employees at least a 10% raise come January 1, 2011.”
That’s nice of Father G, maybe we should send them all Christmas cards 🙂
“I personally wouldn’t give an employee raise if I were them.”
Well the way I heard it this morning when it was announced on the radio Google is giving all their employees this raise
as an incentive to stay with Google.
Google is bleeding employees to Facebook, Twitter and such apparently.
I think at the end of the day it shows our lack of importance in the search channel. Google and Yahoo/Bing know that most domain traffic is theirs no matter what, so why do anything special for us? At the end of the day it is up to us as domain holders to find solutions other than PPC to enhance our income from our domain assets and build greater long-term value. Not easy to do but it can be done. There are many that have moved into the development side of the business, while not easy, are starting to have some success (I got my nose bloodied on my last project, but am at it again). Waiting for Google or the parking companies to do something to help us is like buying tickets on the Titanic.
Michael I agree, my reply was to Matt.
Google has always sucked for parking payouts, and now even Adsense does.
Yahoo/Bing now has jumped on the low payout merry-go-round. RPC has gone up with YB but CTR has crashed. It’s not what is was with Yahoo.
I’m watching the developments in payouts with YB, but if they don’t go up I’m going to say, “Fu*k both you thieving bastards!”.
I’ll make dedicated For Sale pages out of most of my domains in my portfolio if it does not improve here shortly and selectively develop the rest with ads from neither Google or YB. I’ll roll up my sleeves and sell my own ads. It’s really not that hard as I have done it before. If you have great generics almost no advertiser will turn you down for a reasonably priced ads, which will still pay out much, much more that Google and YB does.
It’s getting close to high time we all pull the gravy train away from them.
clearly, Google has FEAR to lose other key programmers and managers (maybe, later hired by Facebook…) but a mere 10% increase of their salaries can’t be enough to avoid to see them “fly” elsewhere… that, since, a top manager that leaves a big company, nearly always, is hired at two, three, five, ten times his past salary by a new company
anyhow, Google has not always applied the right principle to PAY for ideas developed by OTHERS, as (not) happened with this idea that I’ve sent to Google in 2005
ghostnasa.com/posts/008moonprize.html
“but a mere 10% increase of their salaries can’t be enough to avoid to see them “fly” elsewhere”
10% is only the base increase.
There’s also a $1,000 cash bonus which Google will pay the taxes on.
And
“In addition, Google will also give each employee an additional raise equivalent to 1X the employee’s target bonus for the year. And employees will be eligible for additional “merit increases” based on their individual performance.”
Source:
tinyurl (dot) com/GoogleBonuses
“There’s also a $1,000 cash bonus which Google will pay the taxes on.”
very good… now Google managers will no longer accept the multi-million$ job offers from Facebook & Co. 🙂
It’s well documented that direct navigation represents less than 1% of search. Minus out bounce rate and the number of high paying advertisers who won’t advertise on “Google network partners” which parked/adsense sites are, and domain ad revenue is nothing to Google.
A ppc ad on a google search result page costs 8-10x more than one on a network partner (parked/adsense) page for an advertiser. (I spend thousands on PPC each month for my brick and mortar and earn from adsense revenue from directory sites as well.) Which means the payout to the partner (domainers) is 8-10x less even before the split. This is not just Google’s doing. The folks spending the money with Google and managing the ad campaigns are saying “no thank you” to partner sites. Those that track conversions show a much lower rate from partner sites than the G search page. Google would love to collect more revenue, but their customers have spoken.
A 10% raise is a big statement to your people when there is near 10% unemployment. The real paycheck for G employees comes from the stock options, this is a gesture of appreciation and an effort to increase retention.
“a top manager that leaves a big company, nearly always, is hired at two, three, five, ten times his past salary by a new company”
“now G__gle managers will no longer accept the multi-million$ job offers from”
===
What Planet are you people on ?
SEC documents disclose compensation, which does not match your reality.
Hush Money!
UPDATE
The employee of Google that gave this story to the businessinsider.com has been fired.
http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/google-fires-employee-who-leaked-email-about-raises-bonuses/19712664/
You don’t have to wonder anymore where your adsense and parking shortcomings go…
BFitz says, “It’s well documented that direct navigation represents less than 1% of search. Minus out bounce rate and the number of high paying advertisers who won’t advertise on “Google network partners” which parked/adsense sites are, and domain ad revenue is nothing to Google. ”
Less than 1% ? Documentation please.
I’ve previously heard that it was 10% of Yahoo’s traffic and about 3% of Google’s, but don’t know if this is true and I have never seen any study showing the exact number, no less 1%.