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Alphabet announces fourth quarter and fiscal year 2019 results [pdf]
- ckastner 7y agoI can't believe they made $15bn off of YouTube ads. Who are they reaching with that crap? They didn't specify how much they off of YouTube Premium, but at $120/year they'd need 125 million subscribers to match ads revenue.
- ls612 7y agoDoes that $15bn number include all the money google takes in from YouTube ads or just the money they keep after they pay the channels who have monetized their videos?
- H8crilA 7y agoIt's revenue, so before paying off content creators.
- ksec 7y agoDid they mention how much they were paying to content creators? ( Sorry dont have the time to read through it right now )
- PunchTornado 7y ago$1
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- topicseed 7y agoYouTube's non-ads revenue (RED) is in "Google other". So YouTube Ads yielded $15,149,000,000 in revenue in Fiscal Year 2019.
- creato 7y agoAre youtube ads that much worse than cable TV? I pay for youtube premium and don't watch cable TV anymore so I honestly can't say myself, but from what I remember of each, they both seemed about on the same level of garbage-ness.
- ckastner 7y agoAbout three months ago, I visited a friend and we looked up a 15-minute cooking recipe. We were shown three ads in the process. I subscribed to Premium quite early. They were showing me an IKEA bed ad multiple times a day, over a number of days. 3-4 different ads, but always the same product. The end result being that I will sleep on the ground before I ever purchase a Nordli bed.
- saiya-jin 7y agoThis surprises me - from desktop with ublock origin and ghostery, I never, ever see any youtube ads. Just a regular free gmail account. When I see what crap is shown at friends places when they use TV to browse youtube, I want to run away (I am physically allergic to ads it seems). Is this due to some demographic algorithm or something else?
- skinnymuch 7y agoWhat do you mean? You have ad blockers on. So you don’t see ads. That’s your base. When you do see ads. It’s extremely annoying because it’s way above your base. OTOH, friend watching YouTube on tv is used to seeing ads. That’s their base. So it’s not as bad. If all ad blockers stopped working right now forever. You would likely adapt and be more or less fine with (albeit more annoyed) in due time. Not like your friends relish the ads either.
- iamleppert 7y agoThe very fact you remembered the bed at all is a huge win for that ad campaign and would be seen as a success, not a failure. And the fact that ad caused you to purchase something (doesn't matter if it wasn't the bed itself) is a huge win for Google's Youtube advertising strategy. The net result is still causing you to part with money.
- ReptileMan 7y ago>I can't believe they made $15bn off of YouTube ads. Who are they reaching with that crap? Everyone?
- akhilcacharya 7y agoEveryone on their phone, that is, because unless you use PiHole I don't know if it's possible to block it on mobile.
- martindevans 7y agoFirefox on Android with uBlock seems to do the job for me. I just had to disable the YouTube app so that videos play in the browser.
- lostsock 7y agoOr, you know, pay for YouTube Red
- skinnymuch 7y agoThis is HN. Blocking ads scot-free is the moral thing to do for a a fairly large amt of commenters.
- trhway 7y ago>I can't believe they made $15bn off of YouTube ads. Who are they reaching with that crap? searching on some SSO topic i had opened a tab with Okta too, and that opened floodgates - for the month after that i had to listen for those 5 seconds of Okta ads before each and every song on Youtube. I dare you to imagine how much it cost Okta (and thus produced profit for GOOG) given that we're talking about Identity Management in enterprise software and potential cost of the leads there.
- broknbottle 7y agoYou've clearly never attempted to lookup how to do something on YouTube that is related to your car. I literally can't take hearing another O, O, O Reilly auto parts ad
- bilal4hmed 7y agowhere does the money made from youtube tv fall under ? edit :- that fall under the $5.3 bn number for Other revenue. Its termed as youtube non advertising revenue.
- diminish 7y agoQuarter after quarter G seaxeh results turn into ads. At some point there won't be any organic free results and all search results will be paid placements. Which is now 80% true
- ghthor 7y agoI think you are being overly dramatic.
- skinnymuch 7y agoIt’s not 80% true at all. It won’t ever get that far. It’s incredibly saturated now. But companies know there are limits. As an easy example. Facebook stock tanked for a bit partly because they lowered guidance and expectation for their ads. Especially IG ads. As they had saturated how many they can add and push.
- jpm_sd 7y agoCtrl-F "Other Bets operating loss": Q4 2018 (1.3bn) Q4 2019 (2.0bn) Yikes
- reaperducer 7y agoIs "Other bets operating loss" the same as research and development, or is it somehow different?
- jpm_sd 7y ago"Other Bets" includes everything under the Alphabet umbrella that is not Google, which means various entities that are supposed to be turning into individually profitable companies. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-google-bets-factbox/factbox-alphabets-other-bets-in-focus-as-googles-pichai-takes-helm-idUSKBN1Y80ZS https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-google-bets-fact...
- haberdasher 7y agoOther bets = Waymo, Project Wing, Verily, etc.
- thedance 7y agoDeepMind, too? I imagine that is a real money incinerator.
- icedchai 7y agoA drop in the bucket.
- vineyardmike 7y agoIt’s ~25% of Search ads. That’s a big drop in a small bucket.
- zaroth 7y agoSearch was $27b. That’s ~7.5%. It’s approximately a quarter of their Net Income though.
- topicseed 7y agoGoogle Cloud: FY 2019: 8.9bn FY 2018: 5.8bn FY 2017: 4.0bn
- threatripper 7y agoAmazon makes more in a quarter. There's a lot to catch up if google actually wants to become number one in that business.
- bilal4hmed 7y agoAnyone know Azure run rate ?
- sf_rob 7y agoMS included Office in Azure revenue so it's fairly inflated.
- scarface74 7y agoThis meme needs to die. https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-q1-2020-earnings-revenue-up-14-on-office-365-and-azure-growth/ https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-q1-2020-earnings-reven... Office is included in “Productivity and Business Processes” not Cloud.
- aeyes 7y agoThat section of the financial report includes a bunch of stuff like Office 365, Dynamics, LinkedIn and more.
- coolspot 7y agoOffice 365, Dynamics, LinkedIn are in "Productivity and Business Processes" which had revenue of $11.8 Bn in FY20-Q2, Azure is in "Intelligent Cloud" which had revenue of $11.9 Bn in FY20-Q2. See slide 4, 7, 8 and 10 here: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4319939-microsoft-corporation-2020-q2-results-earnings-call-presentation https://seekingalpha.com/article/4319939-microsoft-corporati...
- tristanj 7y agoAs far as I can tell, this is the first time Google has reported YouTube Ad and Google Cloud revenues as separate line items.
- tempsy 7y agoIt's a red herring designed to distract from the fact they missed ad revenue estimates by $800M. Lol at getting downvoted. They missed on revenue and down -5% after hours. This is a fact, not an opinion.
- pc86 7y ago> In Comments > Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- dragonsh 7y agoIt does make a boring reading. But it’s true critical comments are continuous downvoted by PR staff only hope is community is larger than mechanical or automated turks trying to downvote. Many times downvoted -4 to -8, when comments were critical on Google’s stadia service.
- ninetax 7y ago> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email us and we'll look at the data. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- ehsankia 7y ago20% YoY is still a massive growth, just because Wall Street always expects 24% or more doesn't make it any less impressive.
- 7y ago
- wsetchell 7y agoIt is interesting to see the low revenue, slow revenue growth (~20% YoY), and quickly growing expenses from "Other Bets". If the Alphabet model made sense, I'd expect to see a company starting to clearly take off after 5 years. The data shows the opposite.
- drcode 7y agoI think part of the issue is that their "very long bets" (i.e. AI and self driving) have shown enough progress to now be merely "long bets" now which increases R&D expenses and means GOOG is essentially doubling down on the future via "other bets" in lieu of nearer-term revenue. Time will tell if that's a good strategy.
- sytelus 7y agoIt's not very long bets but very few bets. The YC model has shown us that success is highly unpredictable and if you want to have big winners, make a lot of small bets. This is exactly the Nasim Taleb's philosophy and other well-known approaches to cultivating the long tail and outliers. Google actually had right model 15 years ago where they were churning out one product after another and today's big winners like Gmail and Maps are the survivors of that era. The story goes that Larry Page went to Steve Jobs and Jobs told him to cut down on all the random projects and do fewer things. Unfortunately what works for Apple apparently doesn't work for others.
- riyadparvez 7y agoPeople constantly criticizing companies not taking long-term bets. When some company does take long-term bets, then some internet expert come along and find some arbitrary timeline to succeed without any justification and start criticizing without offering anything any substantial. I wish we can have more thoughtful discussion, instead of Twitter style self aggrandizing comments.
- wsetchell 7y agoGoogle takes large long-term bets that are closely related to their core business / competency. Some of those seem to be clearly working (see Cloud, Deepmind). As a shareholder, I want to see more of those. Back when I was at Google, X (which many Other Bets came from) had a goal of all their projects having meaningful impact in 10 years. They've been working on Wing and Waymo for close to 10 years now. Those projects are not yet meaningfully impacting many people. As an armchair CEO, I have doubts about the compensation (more salary / less equity vs startups) and funding (fewer choices funding sources for the companies, weird incentives for the investors vs VC funds) model for "Other Bets". Based off of that and the lack of results, I think they should force the Other Bets to stand on their own vs handing them more cash to burn.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Andrew_nenakhov 7y agoI miss those days when people had nothing but nice things to say about Google, which was supposed to destroy the evil, not join them.
- ehsankia 7y agoI'm curious, what are they doing different now from then? Back then they had an ad business, and now they have an ad business. Back then they created useful services like Maps, Translate or Gmail, now they provide useful services like Photos, Docs and Drive. What are they doing now that is "joining the evil" which they weren't doing before? Is your point about the fact that people's perception has changed? People these days just take free online services for granted and no longer want to put up with ads, but if it were all to go away, the majority of people would see it as a strict negative.
- V-eHGsd_ 7y agoI think it's that, now, everything is to feed the ad business while back in the day, it wasn't. back then, they had lots of cool products, and they also served ads. now they have ads and lots of products the siphon data from users to feed the ads business. I say this as someone worked there for a decade and saw lots of "NSA - not search or ads" t-shirts.
- anaanymouse 7y agoEven less data is being used for ads than when you worked there - Gmail is no longer used, Photos doesn't use them, Android doesn't except insomuch as the Google search bar exists on the home screen, Maps barely has ads...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mehrdada 7y ago> Gmail is no longer used Any evidence of that? Enterprise GSuite is not supposedly used, but consumer Gmail not feeding into ads would be surprising to me. Android feeds location and contacts data.
- pier25 7y agoWhere do ads in third party sites fall into these numbers? "Google Network Members' properties "?