Google will go Bankrupt in 5 years

Most people probably think I'm crazy for writing this. Google had record breaking profits last year, and a revenue that would make most countries blush.

Google has a higher GDP than Russia and France combined, so how can I possibly claim Google will go bankrupt?

Well, they came to power because of people like me, and people like me don't particularly much like them anymore - And there's 30 million like me out there. People like me being software developers of course.

Google Ads is broken

Google Ads is most of Google's revenue. They're probably making almost a trillion dollars per year on it. However, Google Ads is fundamentally broken, and I can prove it.

Last year we spent $15,000 on Google Ads. This gave us roughly 5 paying clients. This is a cost per client of $3,000, and roughly 10x more than what we anticipated. Our ROAS on Google Ads was basically madness!

At this point some Google Ad Experts might say "yes, but you did it wrong". And in fact, they might be right - However, it doesn't matter. If a software developer with 42 years of software development experience and having used 1,000+ different software systems over the years don't understand "how to use your ad dashboard", it is broken - Period!

It wasn't for not trying. I spent countless hours researching how to create converting campaigns, listening to all the top gurus on YouTube, I read 100+ articles, and tried everything I could think of. Google would consistently send us "junk traffic", and I could see it in our own AI chatbot's log, since all questions it was being asked where completely out of sync in regards to our products.

At some point I installed ClickCease, which made me realise that roughly 50% of all our traffic originated from bots and click farms. Regardless of how much I tuned and configured our Google campaigns, I could never make them perform. And it's not like our website isn't clearly communicating our product either. Click here and ask yourself why Google is almost exlclusively sending us 3rd world country teenage students looking to cheat on their homework with AI - In addition to teenagers from Saudi Arabia looking for AI-generated porn ... 🤪

Click farms

A click farm is probably the best business plan in the 21st Century. The way it works, is that you setup your own search engine, using Google's APIs, which then will return their ads in addition to their search results. An experienced JavaScript developer can easily create 15 such "search engines" in a week.

Then you apply for becoming a "Google Partner", which allows you to install a JavaScript snippet on your page, and also get some of the revenue from ads displayed on your site. The process is simple, and only requires you uploading a small HTML file to the domain of your search engine. This HTML file verifies you own the website, and will give you 70% of all ad revenue generated from the site. This is what the "Display partner network" means when you create Google Ads. If you click it as you create your Google Ad campaign it basically translates to ...

"You're too stupid to have money, so we'll just subsidise Bangladesh and Google, emptying your pockets immediately, giving you nothing back in return"

Since you've now got "your own search engine", you can send a link to this "search engine" to your click farm in Bangladesh. A click farm again is basically just 500 people sitting in a room, using your "search engine" to query Google, for then to click on ads it returns.

These users obviously have zero interest in your product, and they earn on average $5 per hour. However, every time they click on an ad, they take 2 dollars out of your pockets and Google takes 1 dollar out of your pocket. On average, each click farm employee can click some 500 ads per hour, implying the owner of the click farm makes $998 in profit per hour for each sucker he drags up from the street and gives basic computer knowledge before he's put in front of a computer to click your ads.

"Money for Nothing and Clicks for Free" comes to mind at this point ... 🤪

In your Google Ads dashboard, and your Google Analytics dashboard, noticing this traffic has been made dramatically more difficult over the years. I can only assume Google doesn't care, as long as you pay them, and they don't want you to know where your clicks are coming from - Because they're making more money from you as long as you don't know.

Google ads has basically turned into a click farm scam

"Smart" campaigns

Then there's "smart Google Ad campaigns", which basically implies Google gets to decide what keywords it shows your ads on, which again translates to "we've got so many people already paying for keyword 'xyz', let's give this guy all the shitty keywords that nobody wants to buy anyway to increase our own personal revenue, giving the schmuck who's paying us zero effect in return for his money, while convincing him of that 'we are saving money for him'".

We'd see traffic like this in our own chatbot logs because of people asking it for images of naked women. So instead of actually sending us users that needed an AI chatbot for customer service that can display product images, and increase e-commerce sales, Google would send us teenagers from India and Pakistan looking for AI-generated porn ... 😜

The remaining parts of our chatbot log would be students trying to make our AI do its homework, typically at junior high level, obviously not resulting in many AI chatbots sold to clients interested in AI for customer service.

Google Ads is FUNDAMENTALLY broken

Maybe a super intelligent Google Ad expert, with 10+ years of experience could have solved these problems. But it actually doesn't matter, and it's really quite irrelevant. To understand why, let's sum up the costs associated with "me doing business with Google".

Spending $5,000+ on optimising our website to win auctions and perform well
Spending 500+ hours on learning how to create a great campaign and have a website that converts with good numbers
Hiring a Google Ads expert for $3,000 per month to create our campaign and monitor it over time once I realise we're not making money by me doing it myself, after having tried half a dozen guys charging $200 per month and not succeeding
Paying $300 per month for some click farm protection service to prevent Google from sending our marketing budget to Bangladesh
A "quadrillion" additional things I forgot to mention above, because I didn't spend 10 years studying Google Ads
This is before I even start paying Google anything, which would probably require some additional $10,000 per month to simply justify the above costs

Now imagine I was a local store selling fruit and veggies to the people in my community. A mom'n'pop store, with a total advertisement budget of $500 per month.

You're better of sending your money directly to Bangladesh. At least then 100% is going to poor people, and Google won't steal 33% of it ...

Alpha Mega can't even get this right

In Cyprus where I live we've got a huge supermarket chain called "Alpha Mega". They've got like half a dozen huge retail stores, where they've got some 50+ employees in each store, probably one of the largest grocery store chains on the island. Similar to SafeWay in the US.

The last couple of years I must have seen at least 500+ ads from them. Their ads are in Greek. I don't understand Greek! Neither does roughly 25% of the island's residents. A quarter of the population here in Cyprus are either British, Russians, or other non-native people who have one thing in common; None of them understands a single Greek word!

I doubt I'm the only guy being served Greek ads. This means that Alpha Mega is literally flushing 25% of their entire advertisement budget down the toilet, because YouTube is serving their ads to people who doesn't even understand the language the ad was created in.

I have no idea how much money Alpha Mega is spending on ads, but I suspect we're talking about easily at least $50,000 per month. Implying $12,500 per month is literally flushed down the toilet because of Google's and YouTube's inability to serve these ads to the right people.

Is this YouTube's fault or is it Alpha Mega's marketing manager's fault? I have no idea, and it's actually irrelevant. I must assume the CMO of Alpha Mega knows what he's doing. After all, he's the CMO of the largest supermarket chain on the island! If he (or she) can't get this right, what makes you think you can get it right?

For fuck's sake, it's a freaking language select drop down list. I could have created it myself in 20 minutes for Google!

Which of course Google doesn't want me to create, even if I offered to do it for free, because they're making money serving irrelevant ads to irrelevant customers, just like our little Click Farm story from above in Bangladesh proves.

Google is SHITTING ON YOUR FACE

I literally cannot emphasise this strongly enough; Google doesn't care. They probably hate you, and think you're too stupid to keep your money, so they'll just lift it out of your pocket, simply because they can!

For a couple of decades they've hired non-binary wanna be communists, with purple hair, and Mao's little red under their pillow, straight out of fairy tale college. Google started out as an idealist company, built upon idealistic values, and therefore they're attracting all the fruitcakes, having been lullabied through their childhood, by their lawyer moms and their doctor dads, chemically cleansed from any real world experience, resulting in altruistic insanity at a level that would even make Sam Bankman Fried's and his "effective altruism" seem like innocent in comparison. Resulting in an employee culture that becomes as follows ...

Google hates people who makes money, so they'll just steal everything from you and send it to Bangladesh! Keeping 30% of it to themselves ...

Paradoxically, it's in their best interest to have such hiring profiles too, since it makes it more likely their employees will steal everything from you. They should change their slogan from do no evil to the following ...

Steal everything from everybody and give it to Google and Bangladesh

Google can't be fixed

It's too late. When something stops working, it'll take years before most people notice. And even if they fix it when people starts noticing, all trust will be gone. Google is destined for bankruptcy in 5 years.

Most people will probably continue throwing money at Google for years, believing it's their own fault their ads aren't converting. Everybody will ask themselves "what's wrong with me" for another handful of years, before realising it wasn't them, it was Google all along. Nobody will even dare to speak up about it, because they're too afraid of having others believe they're stupid.

However, the only thing you're doing here that's stupid is to not speak about it. Because in the end, that's what makes Google able to continue ripping you off, subsidising Bangladesh and purple haired communists in Silicon Valley. Once you admit it to yourselves, and start talking about it, it will simply vanish out of thin air, and no longer be your problem. Google sux! And the first step towards healing is to publicly admit that out loud. So say out loud after me.

Google sux!

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