GWEI: Plot to make Google eat itself | Hacker News Reader

GWEI: Plot to make Google eat itself

gwei.org

63 pointsshii21 comments

What I found surprising about that is that they apparently already own about half a million dollars worth of Google stock. I was expecting something far more toyish.

This site is quite old and is actually an art-project started in 2004 or 2005 (just Google for 'ubermorgen' in combination with 'google will eat itself'). At this time the price of the shares was much lower.

I clicked around the site too, but I couldn't find how long they've been at it yet.

This is funny but it shouldn't really be possible for it to actually work. Every time they get a payout Google has almost certainly profited more from the same activity, assuming their margin on ads is higher than what they pay out to adsense users. So every time they make money they add more than that to the total value of Google, ensuring they could never buy 100% of it.

Well the revenue share from AdSense was revealed to be in the 65% range. So given a poor profitability by Google in the next few million years, it could still work.

According to this:

http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/05/adsense-revenue-share.ht...

it's 68%. Wow, I wasn't expecting google to pay out quite so much.

At those percentages it actually becomes possible. Depending on how profitable the sites and Google are at serving the content and the ads (respectively) it could work.

Agree

but the google earnings not necessarily become capital do they?

If for example they pay out dividends for 100% of their earnings to stockholders, the value of google would stay the same, while this people would own a larger share of the company.

If you rule out that payments are coming from marketing, it's basically like "if I buy stocks of my employer company one day I will own them". Unlikely, but not impossible.

>If for example they pay out dividends for 100% of their earnings to stockholders, the value of google would stay the same, while this people would own a larger share of the company.

Google doesn't pay dividends:

http://investor.google.com/corporate/faq.html#dividend

If it did you are right that the earnings would not add to the total value.

>If you rule out that payments are coming from marketing, it's basically like "if I buy stocks of my employer company one day I will own them". Unlikely, but not impossible.

What does marketing have to do with it? If you buy stock in your employer with your salary you wouldn't always be able to eventually own it. Your contribution to the company is 100 and hopefully you are a net positive contributor and are only paid 50 for that work. The company thus increases in value by 50 through your work. So to eventually own the company you have to invest more than 50 to win the race, otherwise for every bit you buy the company increases in value by more than that. In this mock example 50 is the total of your salary so it's not possible.

Your math is weak. You should go back and study.

The news page was last updated in 2007... Is that because the system is just plodding along running itself, or because this experiment was all over and done 4 years ago?

They write about their own methods:

"Now we have set up [...] Adsense-Accounts [...]. Each time someone visits a Web-Sites within our network of sites, he/she triggers a series of robots. For each click we receive a micropaiment from Google."

Robots? For clicks? That would mean, that they are stealing money from AdWords advertisers.

Did I overlook something?

Looks like a quick way for Google to make a share buyback this way for nothing after legal action costs.

Are all Google's share's on the market? I think the IPO was only for a part of the company, right?

Indeed. Most of the stock is held by the founders and not currently for sale.

In addition, the type of shares on the market have less voting power than what Larry, Sergey, and Eric have. From their most recent yearly report (10-K)[1]:

"Our Class B common stock has 10 votes per share and our Class A common stock has one vote per share. As of January 31, 2011, Larry, Sergey, and Eric owned approximately 91% of our outstanding Class B common stock, representing approximately 67% of the voting power of our outstanding capital stock. Larry, Sergey, and Eric therefore have significant influence over management and affairs and over all matters requiring stockholder approval, including the election of directors and significant corporate transactions, such as a merger or other sale of our company or our assets, for the foreseeable future."

So while this "Google Eats Itself" thing may accumulate a fair amount of Google shares and be worth a lot, it won't really give them any power over the company.

[1] http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/0001193125110...

It is surprising and somewhat ironic to me that these guys have a pagerank of 5. I mean, for this to work they'd require legitimate websites that generate significant ad revenue, that they could afford to keep pouring in Google stock (instead of, say, buying a Maserati).

A WHOIS shows the owner as a guy called Hans Bernhard at ubermorgen.com.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubermorgen

Apparently gwei is supposed to be "conceptual art" project, which explains why so many legitimate sites link to it. If you look around it's been mentioned in Daring Fireball and other legitimate sites as an interesting "conceptual hack". Probably it's Hans Bernhard's other projects that serve as the "hidden Web-Sites" that power gwei.

Either that, or the five hundred Gs is just a number fabricated by a webmaster who insists on using obnoxious flashing backgrounds.

Either way, I doubt gwei was supposed to be a project seriously bent on taking over Google. It's just modern art!

OMG. blinking background! Irritating.

If you want to read those content, disable the stylesheets using "Web Developer Tool".

according to their own calculations [http://gwei.org/pages/google/googleshare.php]: 202.345.117 Years until GWEI fully owns Google.

looks promising.

Sounds like a hoax to me.

If not, it's pretty mean to the advertisers (and possibly criminal).

Why does this get downvoted?

GWEI write on their web site that they are using "robots" for "clicks". If that is the case, it would be criminal, since they would be stealing money from AdWords advertisers.

I don't think its true though, because those kind of accounts usually get banned quickly and the advertisers get their money back.

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