17 ms·

Alphabet reports Q1 earnings

90 points by whitepaint 5y ago

1cvmask 5y ago
Their revenue goes up as their search degrades in quality. Looks like a ripe opportunity for someone to take on the long tail search market. Duckduckgo seems poised to do this. Or perhaps some kids in a garage?
- whitepaint 5y ago
  > their search degrades in quality Are you 100% confident that this is the case? I personally have a completely different experience (their search results have gotten much better than they used to).
  - Judgmentality 5y ago
    Google search results have been gradually getting worse for me as well.
    - munchbunny 5y ago
      Personally I've felt that useful results have been pretty consistently on the first page for a while, and some of the specialized widgets have even improved that, but over the last ~3 years more and more of that has become an exercise of dodging the ads to find the actual result. Feels like the frog getting boiled.
    - version_five 5y ago
      For me it depends on what I'm searching. For more obscure stuff, I find google better. Sometimes I accidentally use bing (it's a default on one of my machines) and I usually eventually have a "oh right, this isn't Google" moment when I can't find what I'm looking for. OTOH, if it's anything that has been SEO'd, I find google has gotten really bad. Last week I tried to google for what frying pan to buy, and everything I saw was a un-trustworthy ad. Incidentally, it's the same for python: you google some very common thing like how to sort a list, the first few links are spam (but the docs are still high in the list usually). You google something obscure and usually get the relevant stack overflow first.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- nonameiguess 5y ago
  Looks like YouTube and Google Cloud Platform drove the gains, not search.
- nr2x 5y ago
  Assistant has gotten mind-blowingly good, I recently started using it after having given up on Siri and the amount of lead Google has on complex spoken queries is insane. Otherwise, DDG is basically privacy chrome on top of Bing's results.
- tryptophan 5y ago
  Im kind of amazed at the lack of search engine innovation. Why can't we explicitly rate results and have them be personalized to us(goodbye quora and wikihow)? Why can't we add tags to results, such as "ad bloated" and have that be taken into account for rankings? It seems like such an obvious next step, but google is too rich for its own good at this point and doesnt need to do anything.
  - wolpoli 5y ago
    For the last three decades, search engines have been presenting results in descending order. While a lot of innovations have happened with the sorting algorithm, it hasn't fundamentally move forward from that. From a user point of view, it's frustrating to look through the result, finding a list of ads, a commercial site, a few videos, a definition, a wikipedia link, a commercial site, and so on. Instead, users have a pretty good idea of what kind of result they want. It would make it so much easier if the results are grouped together. For example, a search engine could group results under individual tabs, separating results from user generated content sites, forums, commerce and commercial blogs, Wikipedia, content farms, and so on. Within each tab, there could be subtabs grouping results under each domain. This would make searching the web a much less frustrating experience.
gnivol 5y ago
There is clearly a significant increase in ads on youtube. It's now as bad as old cable TV channels, its disgusting, personally started reducing youtube consumption. They must've turned on the "milk youtube" knob. Hoping there will be a youtube competitor, they are pretty much a monopoly .
- rawtxapp 5y ago
  Those competitors will also need to cover their costs somehow, they'll either resort to ads or subscriptions. YT premium is just 12$/month, it's the best 12$ I spend every month, YT music is a bonus.
  - TheAdamAndChe 5y ago
    For those who don't want to support YouTube or Google, an app called NewPipe can be installed with F-droid that lets you watch videos without ads.
    - what_ever 5y ago
      > don't want to support YouTube or Google AND the content creator as well. Disc: Googler.
      - TheAdamAndChe 5y ago
        YouTube doesn't support the content creators I watch, they've mostly been demonetized or had their viewership hit by random algorithmic changes. I use patron or streamlabs to support the people who make what I like, not the monopolies who control the infrastructure and try to influence the overton window of society.
        throwaway3699 5y ago
        Yep. Almost every creator I watch is either demonetized or got banned. I'm sick of watching podcasts or gaming videos where people are saying creepy codewords to get around the censorship algorithm.
MarkMc 5y ago
I'm a Google shareholder partly because I find their ads are so poorly targeted at me. For example, I'm currently looking to buy a car - my recent search history includes "buy z4" and "merc c class". Yet YouTube is showing me generic ads for the local supermarket and off-track-betting (and I've never gambled in my life). So it seems Google has a lot of room to improve the algorithm that matches viewer to advertiser
- jandrese 5y ago
  > I'm a Google shareholder partly because their ads are so poorly targeted at me. What? Also, I'm fine with ads not being targeted at me. It's really annoying to look up information on a toaster and then get bombarded with ads for toasters.
  - giarc 5y ago
    I find it more annoying when you get bombarded after buying the toaster. Surely they know I made that purchase and don't have a need for multiple toasters.
    - Rebelgecko 5y ago
      (disclaimer-I work at Google but have no hidden insights here) If you randomly show ads, what are the odds someone just happens to be in the market for a new one toaster? 1 in 1000? On the other hand, what are the odds that someone who just bought a new toaster ends up returning it and being in the market for a new one? Probably much higher.
      - hiq 5y ago
        This! All these comments about how bad ads are at targeting a proper audience really miss the point, you have to make comparisons to conclude anything. If an ad is relevant for x% of users and x is very small, that's still better than 0.5*x%. I don't think it's a mistake if after you bought product P, you get ads for P, it probably does work in practice.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Leary 5y ago
I own Google stocks for the nebulous reason of "AI" for the long term (If the AI overlords invent AGI, I don't want to miss out). With capital gains taxes, I'm not going to trade in and out of every stock every quarter, although it's good to see it go up after hours.
- akomtu 5y ago
  Sounds like a solid investment strategy.
taylodl 5y ago
> "YouTube ads grew nearly 50% year-over-year." And don't we know it! YouTube has quickly become unwatchable. Some of my favorite channels are now available on Nebula. I encourage more creators to go there. I think it's $30/yr, I got a promo and got it for $11.
- refulgentis 5y ago
  for what it's worth, maybe it's compensating _too_ many people, you can also pay $10/month and have ad free YouTube (_and_ YouTube Music, but if you're worried about compensating too many people avoid it, its model is just like Apple Music and Spotify)
gok 5y ago
Over a decade after launch, how is Google Cloud still losing so much money?
- enos_feedler 5y ago
  Because it is designed to lose money. The ROI window for digital transformation for cloud computing is pretty big. If you want to be top 3 in the industry (AWS, Azure, GCP) you've gotta spend, spend, spend. There are infinite things and features you can supply to customers. Have you seen those cloud consoles?
  - s3r3nity 5y ago
    >Because it is designed to lose money. Not sure I understand this response, nor do I agree. AWS drove $13.5B in _profit_ for Amazon in 2020, and has been profitable since at least 2014, _8 years_ after its founding.[1] Why isn't reasonable to ask "where and when is the profit coming?" [1] https://www.geekwire.com/2021/amazon-web-services-posts-record-13-5b-profits-2020-andy-jassys-aws-swan-song/ https://www.geekwire.com/2021/amazon-web-services-posts-reco...
    - enos_feedler 5y ago
      It is reasonable to ask, I am just giving a possible answer.
    - joshuamorton 5y ago
      > Not sure I understand this response, nor do I agree. AWS drove $13.5B in _profit_ for Amazon in 2020, and has been profitable since at least 2014, _8 years_ after its founding.[1] Here's the question to ask: if Google stopped investing aggressively in marketing and building new offerings to expand the Cloud userbase could it be profitable today? Or in other words, is it better to have 30% YoY growth and on paper profitability, or 45% YoY growth and an on paper loss, with the ability to flip the switch and move to the first option whenever you want?
      - 5y ago
alberth 5y ago
Wow, they are generating ~$1.5M/employee ($220B annualized / 140k employees). Their efficiency at that kind of scale is insane.
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  Realistically 10k ads employees are earning $30M each and the other 130k employees are losing $600k each.
  - seaman1921 5y ago
    it must be great working with you
    - dang 5y ago
      Please don't cross into personal attack. Regardless of what you feel you owe another commenter, you owe this community better if you're participating in it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - VikingCoder 5y ago
    Lol, great explanation. Maybe they should just get rid of organic results in Search, and just show Ads. Surely that would be more profitable.
    - ocdtrekkie 5y ago
      With the top four or five results on Google generally being ads, they have essentially already done this.
      - rawtxapp 5y ago
        It really depends on your queries, usually only high commercial intent queries will have these top 4-5 ads.
osrec 5y ago
YouTube has become difficult to watch because of the ads. It's almost as if they're killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. I've reluctantly switched to NewPipe, and can watch videos ad free. I'm all for supporting a business that provides a free service, but now it feels like they're just abusing their position, which is why I switched.
xiphias2 5y ago
I'm mostly interested in how Waymo is doing, as it has the option to clean up air quality by using electric cars, but sadly it's still a very secretive part of Alphabet.
alberth 5y ago
@dang can you merge. Dupe from source https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26961116 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26961116
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
analogdreams 5y ago
Has Alphabet given up on the moonshot investments? The $50B buyback surprised me; surely they could do something better with the money at their scale.
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  That's authorized, not done this quarter. Just saying that they may or may not buyback $50 billion more than was previously authorized. If they find an investment they think would provide better returns they'll push the buyback. Most companies only authorize every few years.
colinmhayes 5y ago
A billion of the profit increase is from expected depreciation adjustment, but growing profit by 2.5x in one year if bonkers. Search made $7 billion more this year and as far as I can tell is effectively exactly the same as it was last year. Goes to show how much advertising money has shifted away from traditional forms like tv/radio/print during the pandemic.
- paxys 5y ago
  It's becoming more and more obvious just how devastating the pandemic was to "traditional" industries already on the decline, while big tech corps largely reaped all the advantages.
  - varispeed 5y ago
    It's a shame that these advantages didn't trickle down to employees. I cannot see any increase in tech wages. Maybe employees should demand 30% of what is revenue per employee figure. If companies like Google find okay to charge developers 30%, then employees maybe should unionise and get paid what they deserve.
    - ffggvv 5y ago
      employees get a fair bit of stock. my friends at google have seen their comp raise 20 or 30 percent from the stock rise in the last year
      - varispeed 5y ago
        There are usually strings attached when it comes to stocks. It's not like you open an account at one of stock trading shops and you get a voucher to buy X amount of stocks. I know few people who left companies who paid this way, and they never could exercise their stocks. For me this is as close to a scam as it gets.
        ffggvv 5y ago
jeffbee 5y ago
Kinda hate to see those share buybacks. You'd think with an organization that large they could think of something useful to do with fifty billion dollars.
- paxys 5y ago
  What's weirder is that a large chunk of expenses for these companies is stock-based compensation for employees, and then they cancel it out by doing buybacks. Maybe try just handing out cash?
  - colinmhayes 5y ago
    Giving out equity is a decent incentive to innovate I guess.
  - nocommentguy 5y ago
    Not weird considering that capital gains are taxed lower than ordinary income.
    - paxys 5y ago
      RSUs handed out by all large companies are also taxed as ordinary income.
      - plantain 5y ago
        a) jurisdiction dependent, it's a bigger company than the US. b) if they issue RSU's at $Y, then buyback stock to drive the price up to $Z, the employee's take $Y as ordinary income, and $Z-$Y as cap gains, which is usually taxed more favourably
        jtsiskin 5y ago
        At what price are the RSU’s taxed - at the point they vest, or when initially allocated?
Steve886 5y ago
Alphabet earnings call https://youtu.be/NJO5SzH3MMo https://youtu.be/NJO5SzH3MMo

90 points by whitepaint 5y ago

Their revenue goes up as their search degrades in quality. Looks like a ripe opportunity for someone to take on the long tail search market. Duckduckgo seems poised to do this. Or perhaps some kids in a garage?

whitepaint 5y ago
> their search degrades in quality Are you 100% confident that this is the case? I personally have a completely different experience (their search results have gotten much better than they used to).
- Judgmentality 5y ago
  Google search results have been gradually getting worse for me as well.
  - munchbunny 5y ago
    Personally I've felt that useful results have been pretty consistently on the first page for a while, and some of the specialized widgets have even improved that, but over the last ~3 years more and more of that has become an exercise of dodging the ads to find the actual result. Feels like the frog getting boiled.
  - version_five 5y ago
    For me it depends on what I'm searching. For more obscure stuff, I find google better. Sometimes I accidentally use bing (it's a default on one of my machines) and I usually eventually have a "oh right, this isn't Google" moment when I can't find what I'm looking for. OTOH, if it's anything that has been SEO'd, I find google has gotten really bad. Last week I tried to google for what frying pan to buy, and everything I saw was a un-trustworthy ad. Incidentally, it's the same for python: you google some very common thing like how to sort a list, the first few links are spam (but the docs are still high in the list usually). You google something obscure and usually get the relevant stack overflow first.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
nonameiguess 5y ago
Looks like YouTube and Google Cloud Platform drove the gains, not search.
nr2x 5y ago
Assistant has gotten mind-blowingly good, I recently started using it after having given up on Siri and the amount of lead Google has on complex spoken queries is insane. Otherwise, DDG is basically privacy chrome on top of Bing's results.
tryptophan 5y ago
Im kind of amazed at the lack of search engine innovation. Why can't we explicitly rate results and have them be personalized to us(goodbye quora and wikihow)? Why can't we add tags to results, such as "ad bloated" and have that be taken into account for rankings? It seems like such an obvious next step, but google is too rich for its own good at this point and doesnt need to do anything.
- wolpoli 5y ago
  For the last three decades, search engines have been presenting results in descending order. While a lot of innovations have happened with the sorting algorithm, it hasn't fundamentally move forward from that. From a user point of view, it's frustrating to look through the result, finding a list of ads, a commercial site, a few videos, a definition, a wikipedia link, a commercial site, and so on. Instead, users have a pretty good idea of what kind of result they want. It would make it so much easier if the results are grouped together. For example, a search engine could group results under individual tabs, separating results from user generated content sites, forums, commerce and commercial blogs, Wikipedia, content farms, and so on. Within each tab, there could be subtabs grouping results under each domain. This would make searching the web a much less frustrating experience.

gnivol 5y ago

There is clearly a significant increase in ads on youtube. It's now as bad as old cable TV channels, its disgusting, personally started reducing youtube consumption. They must've turned on the "milk youtube" knob. Hoping there will be a youtube competitor, they are pretty much a monopoly .

rawtxapp 5y ago
Those competitors will also need to cover their costs somehow, they'll either resort to ads or subscriptions. YT premium is just 12$/month, it's the best 12$ I spend every month, YT music is a bonus.
- TheAdamAndChe 5y ago
  For those who don't want to support YouTube or Google, an app called NewPipe can be installed with F-droid that lets you watch videos without ads.
  - what_ever 5y ago
    > don't want to support YouTube or Google AND the content creator as well. Disc: Googler.
    - TheAdamAndChe 5y ago
      YouTube doesn't support the content creators I watch, they've mostly been demonetized or had their viewership hit by random algorithmic changes. I use patron or streamlabs to support the people who make what I like, not the monopolies who control the infrastructure and try to influence the overton window of society.
      - throwaway3699 5y ago
        Yep. Almost every creator I watch is either demonetized or got banned. I'm sick of watching podcasts or gaming videos where people are saying creepy codewords to get around the censorship algorithm.

MarkMc 5y ago

I'm a Google shareholder partly because I find their ads are so poorly targeted at me. For example, I'm currently looking to buy a car - my recent search history includes "buy z4" and "merc c class". Yet YouTube is showing me generic ads for the local supermarket and off-track-betting (and I've never gambled in my life). So it seems Google has a lot of room to improve the algorithm that matches viewer to advertiser

jandrese 5y ago
> I'm a Google shareholder partly because their ads are so poorly targeted at me. What? Also, I'm fine with ads not being targeted at me. It's really annoying to look up information on a toaster and then get bombarded with ads for toasters.
- giarc 5y ago
  I find it more annoying when you get bombarded after buying the toaster. Surely they know I made that purchase and don't have a need for multiple toasters.
  - Rebelgecko 5y ago
    (disclaimer-I work at Google but have no hidden insights here) If you randomly show ads, what are the odds someone just happens to be in the market for a new one toaster? 1 in 1000? On the other hand, what are the odds that someone who just bought a new toaster ends up returning it and being in the market for a new one? Probably much higher.
    - hiq 5y ago
      This! All these comments about how bad ads are at targeting a proper audience really miss the point, you have to make comparisons to conclude anything. If an ad is relevant for x% of users and x is very small, that's still better than 0.5*x%. I don't think it's a mistake if after you bought product P, you get ads for P, it probably does work in practice.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Leary 5y ago

I own Google stocks for the nebulous reason of "AI" for the long term (If the AI overlords invent AGI, I don't want to miss out). With capital gains taxes, I'm not going to trade in and out of every stock every quarter, although it's good to see it go up after hours.

akomtu 5y ago
Sounds like a solid investment strategy.

taylodl 5y ago

> "YouTube ads grew nearly 50% year-over-year." And don't we know it! YouTube has quickly become unwatchable. Some of my favorite channels are now available on Nebula. I encourage more creators to go there. I think it's $30/yr, I got a promo and got it for $11.

refulgentis 5y ago
for what it's worth, maybe it's compensating _too_ many people, you can also pay $10/month and have ad free YouTube (_and_ YouTube Music, but if you're worried about compensating too many people avoid it, its model is just like Apple Music and Spotify)

gok 5y ago

Over a decade after launch, how is Google Cloud still losing so much money?

enos_feedler 5y ago
Because it is designed to lose money. The ROI window for digital transformation for cloud computing is pretty big. If you want to be top 3 in the industry (AWS, Azure, GCP) you've gotta spend, spend, spend. There are infinite things and features you can supply to customers. Have you seen those cloud consoles?
- s3r3nity 5y ago
  >Because it is designed to lose money. Not sure I understand this response, nor do I agree. AWS drove $13.5B in _profit_ for Amazon in 2020, and has been profitable since at least 2014, _8 years_ after its founding.[1] Why isn't reasonable to ask "where and when is the profit coming?" [1] https://www.geekwire.com/2021/amazon-web-services-posts-record-13-5b-profits-2020-andy-jassys-aws-swan-song/ https://www.geekwire.com/2021/amazon-web-services-posts-reco...
  - enos_feedler 5y ago
    It is reasonable to ask, I am just giving a possible answer.
  - joshuamorton 5y ago
    > Not sure I understand this response, nor do I agree. AWS drove $13.5B in _profit_ for Amazon in 2020, and has been profitable since at least 2014, _8 years_ after its founding.[1] Here's the question to ask: if Google stopped investing aggressively in marketing and building new offerings to expand the Cloud userbase could it be profitable today? Or in other words, is it better to have 30% YoY growth and on paper profitability, or 45% YoY growth and an on paper loss, with the ability to flip the switch and move to the first option whenever you want?
    - 5y ago

alberth 5y ago

Wow, they are generating ~$1.5M/employee ($220B annualized / 140k employees). Their efficiency at that kind of scale is insane.

oh_sigh 5y ago
Realistically 10k ads employees are earning $30M each and the other 130k employees are losing $600k each.
- seaman1921 5y ago
  it must be great working with you
  - dang 5y ago
    Please don't cross into personal attack. Regardless of what you feel you owe another commenter, you owe this community better if you're participating in it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- VikingCoder 5y ago
  Lol, great explanation. Maybe they should just get rid of organic results in Search, and just show Ads. Surely that would be more profitable.
  - ocdtrekkie 5y ago
    With the top four or five results on Google generally being ads, they have essentially already done this.
    - rawtxapp 5y ago
      It really depends on your queries, usually only high commercial intent queries will have these top 4-5 ads.

osrec 5y ago

YouTube has become difficult to watch because of the ads. It's almost as if they're killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. I've reluctantly switched to NewPipe, and can watch videos ad free. I'm all for supporting a business that provides a free service, but now it feels like they're just abusing their position, which is why I switched.

xiphias2 5y ago

I'm mostly interested in how Waymo is doing, as it has the option to clean up air quality by using electric cars, but sadly it's still a very secretive part of Alphabet.

alberth 5y ago

@dang can you merge. Dupe from source https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26961116 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26961116

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

analogdreams 5y ago

Has Alphabet given up on the moonshot investments? The $50B buyback surprised me; surely they could do something better with the money at their scale.

colinmhayes 5y ago
That's authorized, not done this quarter. Just saying that they may or may not buyback $50 billion more than was previously authorized. If they find an investment they think would provide better returns they'll push the buyback. Most companies only authorize every few years.

colinmhayes 5y ago

A billion of the profit increase is from expected depreciation adjustment, but growing profit by 2.5x in one year if bonkers. Search made $7 billion more this year and as far as I can tell is effectively exactly the same as it was last year. Goes to show how much advertising money has shifted away from traditional forms like tv/radio/print during the pandemic.

paxys 5y ago
It's becoming more and more obvious just how devastating the pandemic was to "traditional" industries already on the decline, while big tech corps largely reaped all the advantages.
- varispeed 5y ago
  It's a shame that these advantages didn't trickle down to employees. I cannot see any increase in tech wages. Maybe employees should demand 30% of what is revenue per employee figure. If companies like Google find okay to charge developers 30%, then employees maybe should unionise and get paid what they deserve.
  - ffggvv 5y ago
    employees get a fair bit of stock. my friends at google have seen their comp raise 20 or 30 percent from the stock rise in the last year
    - varispeed 5y ago
      There are usually strings attached when it comes to stocks. It's not like you open an account at one of stock trading shops and you get a voucher to buy X amount of stocks. I know few people who left companies who paid this way, and they never could exercise their stocks. For me this is as close to a scam as it gets.
      - ffggvv 5y ago

jeffbee 5y ago

Kinda hate to see those share buybacks. You'd think with an organization that large they could think of something useful to do with fifty billion dollars.

paxys 5y ago
What's weirder is that a large chunk of expenses for these companies is stock-based compensation for employees, and then they cancel it out by doing buybacks. Maybe try just handing out cash?
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  Giving out equity is a decent incentive to innovate I guess.
- nocommentguy 5y ago
  Not weird considering that capital gains are taxed lower than ordinary income.
  - paxys 5y ago
    RSUs handed out by all large companies are also taxed as ordinary income.
    - plantain 5y ago
      a) jurisdiction dependent, it's a bigger company than the US. b) if they issue RSU's at $Y, then buyback stock to drive the price up to $Z, the employee's take $Y as ordinary income, and $Z-$Y as cap gains, which is usually taxed more favourably
      - jtsiskin 5y ago
        At what price are the RSU’s taxed - at the point they vest, or when initially allocated?

Steve886 5y ago

Alphabet earnings call https://youtu.be/NJO5SzH3MMo https://youtu.be/NJO5SzH3MMo