Re:My Nightmare Interviews With Google
by ryanwaggoner on Friday November 13, 2009 @05:00PM
(#940921)
To be honest, I think the approach she took is a lot more reasonable. The whole point of building a product business is that your revenue scales differently from your expenses. Your example has an implicit assumption that Google is somehow artificially regulating demand so they can keep their profit margin at 20%. The profit margin on Gmail could be 5% or 99%. Who knows?
No argument here. The only reason I went down this road was because I figured any guesses I made about actual click rates of users would be mostly based on a sample of 1 and thus even more laughably off than guessing the minimum viable earnings...of course, this is why one should never be ashamed to say you don't know. It's one thing to speculate and exhibit your thinking process, but when you start getting confident about it it's all too easy to slip in bullshit artistry, and I'm sure they'd rather avoid that trait in hiring.
The internet claims 4 mill http://erictric.com/us/how-much-money-does-google-make-per-d...
And the internet can't do math...
"In the second quarter alone, Google has managed to reel almost $1.5 billion in earnings."
"If you do the mathematics here, Google is making upwards of $4 million daily"
Except they mistakenly used the quarterly earnings in place of annual earnings. So it would be in the range of 4x that.
Then again you could figure Google makes about $5 billion a year in profit, say a tenth of that comes from gmail, and the profit margin is 10%, suggesting ~$15m a day in earnings (not profits) which is off by a factor of 500 from the above. That sounds a lot more likely.