Google Ventures providing and unfair advantage for their own investment

[JG42122]

I was on Twitter this morning and saw an interesting tweet from @google about their Google Ventures program. Google Ventures is basically an investing firm set up by Google they invest in your website and they take some of your profits. According to WIKI Google Ventures is the venture capital investment arm of Google Inc. that makes financially driven investments in technology companies. Google Ventures seeks to invest in start-up companies in a variety of fields ranging from Internet, software, and hardware to clean-tech, bio-tech, and health care.

I then went over to their website and started investigating I was shocked to see right on their website
"We provide unparalleled (and real) access to Google’s massive network of employees and alumni."
http://www.googleventures.com/hands-on#google-mentors


Matt Rogers
Co-founder, Nest
“The top way that Google Ventures has helped us is on the marketing side. They’ve given us an enormous amount of expertise and help with online marketing that has directly led to increased traffic to our site.”

How Do we help

Search-engine marketing

http://www.googleventures.com/hands-on#engineering-team

Then I started checking out the rankings of the companies Google funds and almost everyone of them I checked are #1 or #2 for their keywords. That could be because these companies have unparalleled (and real) access to Google’s massive network of employees and alumni. Which is something we don't have I honestly don't see how Google can get away with this.

These brands they invest in get to attend " private
SEO Summit June 20, 2012 at Startup Lab Portfolio companies only" held by Google engineers. http://startuplab.googleventures.com/

They also have the ability "to ask questions face-to-face, you can join the Hangout (up to 9 of you)." http://startuplab.googleventures.com/improved-workshop-broadcasts-2012-05-06

I am sure my website would be doing a whole lot better if I could attend these private seo meetings held by Google and ask face to face questions what do you guys think? Personally I think it's a conflict of interest lets say your a Google Investor and a company you have spent 10 million dollars on comes to you and says I can't pay you this month because my website just went to page 5 due to this Panda update. How long do you think that site would stay on page 5?

[alphaomega]

I guess Google is a private company and is entitled to use it's power which ever way they choose. Fair or unfair to the rest of us. Google created another latent monopoly under the cloak of search engine. The crawl gives them the information they need, webmasters give them all the support they need, so now they are using this to pick the fruit. Money. Enormous amounts of money. Sounds fair? Depending on which site you stand.

[blitzen]

If you're talking about organic search positioning - you have to live with it. That is a free service G provides and I cannot justify any "fair" practice for a freebie.
Just like PPC where companies pay for positioning, this is just a different way to pay for positioning.

How much does it cost to "buy" into this G venture? As a venture capitalist, G invests financial capital or other means of support, then gets profits back from the company - that is what the company pays G.

I am amazed at how much Internet so-called "entrepreneurs", aka website owners, suck up to the third parties like Amazon, eBay, Google, etc to work hard for them only to reap minimal rewards while the Big Boys grow wealthier and wealthier - much wealthier than the people/companies that they take advantage of.

E.g., 20% of sales goes to Amazon if you are in an unfortunate category that pays that much. Heck - I am lucky to make 20% net profit at the end of the year with fierce competition in my product line - the line that Amazon wants 20% before I pay my real bills.

Merchants have to get clever to stay viable, profitable, and grow.
Any ideas how? - Perhaps launch a government search engine for us that doesn't take advantage of the merchant? Perhaps brick-n-mortars? Perhaps mall kiosks with Internet shops - oh yea, all that costs money.

They days are gone where the Internet used to be much more fair and helpful to the small merchants.