I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [66]
The Netscapees (as former Netscape employees are called) in our business-development department were ironing out the wrinkles with BeFree, our affiliate-program management company. I expected it to take weeks for such a complex deal to be completed. It was close to New Year's, and nobody did serious business around the holidays. Larry did. He wanted the program launched immediately. Cindy sent me a note at four in the morning explaining this very succinctly. Every passing minute we did not have an affiliate program in place was an affront to Larry, and that got back to Cindy. When Cindy couldn't sleep, I had nightmares. And when I had nightmares, I grumbled to my wife.
"Haven't we earned some slack? I mean, things are going pretty well overall, considering most of the marketing group is so new. We've already developed a marketing plan and a budget..."
"Wait, didn't you tell me the budget was cut?" Kristen asked, just to prove she didn't always ignore me when I talked about work.
"I set up a committee to prioritize projects," I said, ignoring her.
"Oh. So they decided not to kill your committee after all?" Now she was toying with me.
"I worked with engineering on measuring traffic! I collected user testimonials! I put together UI guidelines!"
"I'm sure the engineers really appreciated that," she said in the soothing tone she used on the children. Clearly I would have to stop sharing so many of my frustrations with her.
It did feel as if we had digested huge projects during a period most companies spent eating down the leftovers from their Christmas parties. And not just systems stuff. We'd also begun updating the Google corporate pages, run focus groups with an outside research firm, redesigned our corporate stationery, and printed sales collateral. We'd even managed some guerrilla marketing at MacWorld in San Francisco, where we showed up at dawn to hand out thousands of Google-branded luggage tags before Apple's goon squad chased us away for lack of a permit.
"Luggage tags are the key to Google's growth," Sergey had dryly remarked when I pointed out that Apple-related searches on Google went up noticeably, if not significantly, in the weeks that followed.
All that effort without any inkling of what our overall company priorities or strategy might be. I began to suspect that my new employer's expectations were always going to exceed my capacity by at least thirty percent.
The affiliate program launched in early 2000, less than a month after the contract was signed with BeFree. It was a time suck from day one. Tens of thousands of affiliates signed up to be paid for sending a search or two a day our way. Most of the traffic came from a handful of large sites and a swarm of dishonest spammers. It wasn't hard to put a Google search box on a web page and then write a program to keep entering searches into it. Each week we prepared a list of cheaters we needed to block, but it was the legitimate low earners who ate up most of my time. They clamored for their two-dollar checks as if nothing else stood between them and the soup kitchen.
We started off paying three cents for each search sent our way, then cut it back to a penny. Traffic instantly plateaued. I never felt the expense and the hassle were worth the trickle of new users we were attracting, but Larry believed acquiring new users this way cost less than finding them through online advertising. Susan took control of the program a few weeks later, since she managed our other search-technology products. Secretly I celebrated having an albatross off my neck, and took some solace from the fact that even in Susan's more willing hands our affiliate network never contributed to the bottom line. A year after its launch, Susan asked me to write a letter telling our affiliates we were killing