Can even Google ride the recession?

People see the internet as a living breathing thing. It changes by the second, advances by the hour and more and more people use it by the day.

Many people forget about the goings on of 2000/2001 (read more below) and seem to think that websites, due to relatively low overheads will be more immune to the impending recession we now face.

Well think that at your own peril!

Even google are at present preparing themselves for the recession.
Their share price is at a 3 year low and has halved in the last year.
Every company peaks! And maybe, just maybe google has peaked and is now seeing a downturn. It'll take a while for the boys like Yahoo and MSN to catchup but with google this past month reversing certain "Rules" they had, such as allowing gambling firms to take out sponsored selling and attempting to push You-Tube into E-commerce. They are seriously throwing their weight about trying to bring in extra revenues.

Established websites are cutting their marketing budgets and smaller websites are pushing less into google adwords and more into SEO, hoping the longer term effects of good seo will see their sites thrive or at least survive.

All of this will hit google hard over the next 8 months or so. Maybe they are big enough to ride the storm but the term "The bigger you are the harder you fall." has never seemed more apt!


In 2000 /2001 there was a big "dot.com bubble burst" which saw many websites, which had received millions of pounds of investment thrown at them, go POP!

The stock markets in western nations had watched stock valuations rise faster than usual and with less caution. This quickly turned into a gold rush.
Venture capitalists suddenly wanted a dot.com or a part of a dot.com.
Being dot.com's these companies where nigh on impossible to value, but simply based on the amount of investment received many individuals who had the intitial ideas for these websites, found themselves on paper at least to be suddenly multi-millionaires.

It didn't take long of course for the stock market to step back and look at these sites and realise they where never in a million years going to recoup the tens of millions invested in them. That's when it all fell flat on it's face!

The Dot-com bubble crash wiped out $5 trillion in market value of technology companies from March 2000 to October 2002.

Famously Boo.com set out to become a global online fashion empire. They spent about £100m in a space of 6 months, the site launched in Autumn 1999 and was placed into receivership in May 2000.

Yahoo went from a high stock price of $128 at the peak of the bubble to a low of $4 at the end.

Lycos where the "google of their day" and where sold to Terra Networks for $12.5 billion in 2000, they where sold on for just $95 million dollars three and a half years later.

Infospace stock price hit $1,305 per share in March 2000 but by April the following year the price had crashed to $22 !!