This Basic Chrome Extension Is Making $44,000,000/Year - YouTube

Channel: My First Million

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i started i i got kind of curious so
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there's two extensions that caught my
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caught my attention the first and
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they're basically the same thing with
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almost exactly the same name the first
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is this thing called ad block i think
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that's the one i use the second one is
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called adbot ad block plus so that's why
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it's a little confusing and so adblock
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was created by one guy in georgia named
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michael gundlach and he uh uh
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he
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just kind of built this thing in 2009
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and he's been the only employee the
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whole time and i went to his personal
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website to learn about him and he only
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has 55 followers on uh twitter his
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website is called sorryrobot.com that's
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his personal website and he has like
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python projects a unity game that he
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built called asteroids and he even has
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an mp3 of him singing a christmas song
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at church during christmas time
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this is like by the way his linkedin
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his job description is just a guy
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uh he is in duluth georgia and it says i
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am not available for work please do not
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contact me about job opportunities i
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created adblock the most popular chrome
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extension for google chrome extension
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and for safari with around 20 million
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users it's neat
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before that i did some other neat things
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and he was the only employee and then i
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did some research on his competitor
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called ad block plus now this company
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they have a few few more employees i
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think they've got 20 or 30 people and
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because they're based in europe when
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you're a european company oftentimes at
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least in england and i know it's a lot
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of the k uh a lot of cases in different
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european countries if you make over 20
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million dollars in revenue you basically
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have to file a report that reveals your
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revenue and profit and so i went and
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looked at this company called io it's
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called io they own ad blocker plus in
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2017 they did 44 million dollars in
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revenue and 26 million dollars in profit
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which is astounding and they had at
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least a hundred million users however
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if you look in the group the the chrome
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plug-in store uh ad block plus has
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around 150 000 reviews and it says
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they've got over 10 million users if you
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look at ad block which is the one
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founded by this one guy they've got
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something like 300 000 reviews and uh
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also it says 10 million users and so
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there's potential that this one guy had
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a business making all of this money
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tens of millions of dollars a year very
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likely tens of millions of dollars a
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year in profit just off a chrome
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extension is that amazing this is
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amazing i'm i'm still on this guy
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michael gunlock's uh
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website sorry robot.com resume um dot
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pdf and
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i i think you said this but i was
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reading while you were talking so he was
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an engineer at google working on google
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ads and google adsense did you already
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say that part no and
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he worked on google and basically he
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goes nah that i hate these ads
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so his job was he goes at google i kept
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the global at google ads and adsense
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networks alive and kicking um in my
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spare time i built this other thing and
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i built this other thing uh you know
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like because google has that 20 times
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like i built this javascript framework
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blah blah so basically he goes from
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working at google and google adwords and
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ad sets to creating adblock
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and and makes 20 million dollars it
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makes more than that uh off 20 million
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users who who love this thing and what
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year did you work at google i believe
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like 0.5 2005 yeah so which is like
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right after the ipo basically yeah so he
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probably made 30 million dollars at
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google like collectively it's pro that's
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what it's worth now
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yeah if he held it so it made tens of
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millions of dollars off of that and then
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reportedly now the thing about this guy
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is everything's very quiet about this
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guy he's hard to find everything's
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impossible however i think in 2015 an
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anonymous buyer bought adblock
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interesting there's a world where it
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could have been sold for like two or
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three hundred million dollars i mean
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there's a world where that exists uh
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maybe it was lower but
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it was it's a it's a huge problem he
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stopped he he stopped working on ad
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block or you know it sold probably 2015
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which is kind of scary because these
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chrome extensions are a giant security
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hole for people because chrome
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extensions can like read and write all
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the data on your
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as you browse the web so that's all
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every email you're writing the text is
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can be picked up by these chrome
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extensions and even if they start off
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safe because you know just a guy from
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duluth georgia built it and he's an
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engineer who has the right intentions
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somebody who buys it with the wrong
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intentions can really like uh do some
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dirty stuff
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you know with the data and even
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modifying it and things like that so you
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got to be careful with chrome extensions
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i try to install the minimum amount of
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chrome extensions as possible yeah they
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are pretty scary and um yeah they're
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nuts and
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but it's a
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wild business i think that what here's
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here so i love these extension style
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businesses