Its been the buzz on the net that the founders of Google, a barely known search engine, would be taking a $1 salary for 2007. Now, are these signs of instability in the company? Creative tax evasion? Who knows, and does it really matter? When you can buy an online service thats actually losing money instead of making it (see. You tube), you can pretty much pay yourself anything you want.

Google’s first-quarter profit rose 69 percent and results beat Wall Street expectations as the company turned search market share gains into even more revenue from its core paid search advertising business.

Net income for the first quarter was $1 billion, or $3.18 a share, up from $592 million, or $1.95 a share, a year ago. Excluding one-time items such as employee stock-based compensation, income was $3.68 a share, higher than analyst expectations of $3.30 a share, according to a poll by Thomson Financial.

[Editor’s note: With this article, we’re welcoming guest contributor, Gareth Davies of GSINC, to the Marketing Pilgrim team.]
How come some ECommerce websites flourish but many just drift along or even fail altogether?
Having worked with many websites that have grown to turnovers of £1m GBP (and more) we have been able to observe common traits that apply to almost all of them

Not only is Google being charitable with its money via the Google Checkout program, giving you $10 towards purchases of TV’s, DVD players, sweaters, and lots of other stuff, but they’re also giving money to charity. Google unveiled its “Cyber Monday” promotion, which includes some new merchants that accept Checkout, including a few charities.
So, instead of saving ten bucks on that new video game, you can give $30 to the United Nations Foundation, the Acumen Fund, TechnoServe, Global Green USA, and Campus Climate Challenge, and Google will add ten dollars to your donation

For fun, my MSN Direct watch
is set to show the stock prices of all the major search engines. It only works
in the US, and I wish I were there now to capture a screen from it showing
Google having

broken the $500 per share mark. AP has a longer story on it

here. It’s around $503 when I
looked just now.
No doubt Safa Rashtchy at Piper Jaffray is keeping his fingers crossed (along
with thousands of Googlers) that it will keep going. Earlier this year, Safa
predicted a $600
price point by the end of 2006.

Shoemoney has written about a new AdSense quality score bot that will deal with arbitragers and made for AdSense (MFA) sites. Of course it’s no secret that Google has been working on a new bot to evaluate the quality of pages that host AdSense ads, people on the major webmaster forums have been discussing it.

Apparently Jeremy has an inside source who says “the big changes are purely targeted at the arbitragers” and this new bot would evaluate links and text on pages to indicate whether the page was a landing page for contextual search arbitrage or cost per action arbitrage.

Jeremy goes on to explain that you can set up your own link redirection script to mitigate the effects of this new technology. So if this is aimed at your site, be ready to pay more for your Adwords campaign, or cloak your links.

UPDATE: You might also like to read what Google has to say about landing page quality.

This time Samba is the recipient of a $20,000 donation from Google. Samba is an Open Source/Free Software suite that has, since 1992, provided file and print services to SMB/CIFS clients, including the numerous versions of Microsoft Windows operating systems.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google Inc. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt on Tuesday denied a widely circulated rumor that his company had set aside $500 million to settle copyright claims by media companies as part of its deal to acquire video-sharing site YouTube Inc.

Speaking to more than 500 Internet industry insiders at the annual Web 2.0 Summit, Schmidt said an anonymous blog post asserting YouTube has reserved $500 million for legal claims, out of the $1.65 billion takeover price, was “not true.”

Web and sports entrepreneur Mark Cuban, an outspoken critic of the Google-YouTube deal, late last month posted a claim from an anonymous blogger that he had inside information on the secret reserve plan.

The rumor-starting post can be found here.

Via Reuters.

Google has donated $30,000 to Creative Commons, the open licensing organization. Update: And has gained quite some publicity for it.

The official Google blog announced yesterday that it would pass on most of the advertising revenue generated by the new “exploding diet coke” video to Coke and Mentos. If you haven’t seen these videos by the guys in white lab coats from Eepybird, you’re in for a treat. They create a whole show revolving around mixing Diet Coke and Mentos and making it shoot high in the sky. But perhaps the most interesting part is that Google has agreed to share the advertising revenue with the makers of the film. If you think you’ve got a video worthy of this revenue sharing program, just get in touch with Google.

Haven’t used Google Checkout yet? Take a quick tour and see if you’re hooked.

Now that YouTube belongs to Google, there might be a plan in place to allow users who upload popular videos to share in the ad revenue from the pages where those videos are displayed. The could be quite lucrative given that YouTube shows an estimated 100 million videos a day and has over 72 million visitors a month.

Google will try to become a $100 billion company this year. I’m not sure exactly what that means, and neither does the head honcho at Google either.

“I’ll leave it to you to judge whether that is $100 billion in market capitalization or revenue,” Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said when discussing priorities for 2006.

Read on.

Marketwatch has an interesting and insightful analysis of Google’s current position, comparing them to Yahoo in 2001 just before their revenue model collapsed.

Read the story here.