HOW GOOGLE GENERATES SO MUCH REVENUE (Don’t ignore this)

As we enter the 2nd half of the year; I believe that what you are about to read will really be helpful if you are currently managing a business or a startup, be it in Africa or Asia and you really want to see your set goals achieved.

Every ambitious person admires Google Inc. as a company, while a few wish that they could build their current company to be as big as Google someday. However, the question you must ask yourself is; how does Google think when it comes to revenue generation?

There was a time Yahoo was bigger than Google, in 1998. Google (back then was called Page rank) approached and asked Yahoo to buy them for a Million dollars. Yahoo declined this offer. Hence, Google had to find another way to grow and grow really fast; they had to think differently. The first question they answered was “who currently has our customers?

In the year 2004, an internet browser called Mozilla Firefox was created. This was the era web surfing was seriously growing. It was a free to download software. In the year Firefox was released, it was downloaded over 60 million times within a 9 months period. By 2015, 300 million people use Firefox daily to access the internet. A lot of people have asked the question: how do they generate revenue since the software is free to download? Let me explain one of its revenue channels.

Someone in Google saw this as a potential opportunity, so he approached Firefox and this was the agreement: Make “www.Google.com” the default destination on the Firefox browser. So, if anyone downloads and installs Firefox, their first landing page will be www.google.com. He believed that if more people carry out searches on Google’s search page, they will be presented with adverts that are displayed by Google’s paying advertisers. In 2011, Google signed another deal (a 3 year deal) with Mozilla Firefox for 900 million USD. In that year Google generated 37.9 billion USD and in 2012 it generated 43.7 billion USD in revenue respectively. Google saw this as a great opportunity, so it started working on its own internet browser called Google Chrome. Today Google Chrome is the number one internet browser and has over 650 million users. In 2017 Google revenue was 109.65 billion USD and has over 64 revenue channels.

So, what is the lesson you can learn as a founder or a CEO or MD? We are in a time where the economy is so hard, especially in the business space. The image must businesses has can be likened to a water dam. That has 5 connecting pipeline. Only one of the 5 pipelines in an in-flow (revenue) while the other 4 are out flows (expenses). If you can relate to this image then you are about to get a solution.

The big question you need to be asking is: how can you identify or create revenue opportunities that will be beneficial to your business? I sincerely believe that if your businesses only revenue channel is the same as that of every other competing business in your industry, it is bound to struggle. Competing is simply not an effective growth strategy; to dominate, you have to ask the questions others never consider asking.

First you need to understand that solution does not solely lie in ‘working hard’, but it begins with thinking differently, which a lot of people have admitted is not easy. This is why I have created the Switch Thinking process. What I tell a lot of business owners I have had an opportunity to talk to is that, every business has at least 7 channels to bring in revenue. Over 98% of small businesses are so fixed on 1 or 2 channels (which is the conventional one-on-one selling to customers), while they ignore the big opportunities that have high revenue potentials. This is why so many companies are struggling: finding it difficult to pay their passionate employees and make a profit. This should not be the case. As you start this new week, I want you to sincerely look at your businesses and ask yourself: what are the possible revenue channels my business has, which I am ignoring?

If you can’t answer this question, then you need to understand how you can apply the Switch thinking process to your business.