3 ms·

We'll see. Facebook might do poorly in Q2, but Alphabet does way more than advertising now: it does cloud infrastructure (GCP) and productivity (Google Apps for

• pc86 7y ago
  We'll see if the lion's share of the pandemic closures happened in Q2? That's an objective fact. We started feeling it in March but the vast majority of action happened in April. April is in Q2.
  • bhupy 7y ago
    No, we'll see the degree to which Alphabet is exposed to the pandemic closures — which as you said, objectively happened. A key detail from the Alphabet earnings: there appeared to be different performance trajectories for the brand and direct response components of their advertising. Direct response continued to have substantial year-on-year growth throughout the entire quarter — can be explained by brands now directly reaching people at home under quarantine. Brand advertising growth accelerated in the first 2 months of the quarter, but began to experience a headwind in mid-March. Snap's earnings call appeared to include the same observation, from Evan Spiegel: "In the short-term, we are shifting sales resources and pulling forward some investments in direct response to better serve the advertisers who are trying to reach our audience during this time…". Additionally, Alphabet obviously also makes its money through Google Cloud Platform, whose compute usage will continue to pick up as more and more people consume online content at home. The net argument is that, even in Q2, Alphabet might come out looking stable because it is not as exposed to the downsides of COVID as, say, Twitter or Facebook. THAT is what I mean when I say "we'll see".