4 ms·
Realistically 10k ads employees are earning $30M each and the other 130k employees are losing $600k each.
by oh_sigh 6y ago
Realistically 10k ads employees are earning $30M each and the other 130k employees are losing $600k each.
- seaman1921 6y agoit must be great working with you
- dang 6y agoPlease 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 6y agoLol, great explanation. Maybe they should just get rid of organic results in Search, and just show Ads. Surely that would be more profitable.
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoWith the top four or five results on Google generally being ads, they have essentially already done this.
- rawtxapp 6y agoIt really depends on your queries, usually only high commercial intent queries will have these top 4-5 ads.
- pmayrgundter 6y agoThis is the case
- scrollaway 6y agoaka "you could be making so much more money if you didn't spend a bunch of your time sleeping, eating and showering".
- est31 6y agoNo, this is a fairly common criticism of public companies: stock markets don't like conglomerates, they value them at a discount [0]. It gives less power to stock holders. Investors should be able to decide whether they want to keep their position in a browser company or a mobile phone OS company instead of Google managers deciding it. Instead of having one highly profitable company focused on ads that pays out excellent dividends, Google leadership chose to spend it on lots of expensive employees instead. A good counter argument to this is that if Google didn't do it, then a significant portion of their valuation would vanish due to the issue that in technology, companies which can't transition to newer revenue models perish as technology evolves. So personally I don't agree with the criticism, but I think it's legitimate. [0]: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/conglomeratediscount.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/conglomeratediscount.as...
- blackoil 6y agoIt also doesn't values the leverage owning complete ecosystem gives the company. If Apple decides to split iPhone, iOS, iPad, AppStore, Music/Content in different companies the value will be much lower than of a company together. Total>Σ(parts)
- beambot 6y agoI'm confused by the conglomeration argument... even beyond the innovator's dilemma aspect. The conglomerate market cap may be less than the sum of its parts at any given instant, but that completely discounts the strategic interplay between subsidiaries that results in substantially larger growth prospects & marketshare capture. This isn't universally true -- e.g. GE Healthcare & GE Aviation probably have very little overlapping strategic benefit. However, Google Adwords, Adsense, YouTube, Gmail ads, etc all benefit from common infrastructure & distribution. Or in the case of Berkshire, the ability to gobble up new investments relies on the tax-advantaged leverage of the insurance float.
- summerlight 6y agoI know you're just being satirical, but this kinds of arguments are brought up quite frequently even in serious debates. But the reality is that: 1. Ads depends on its cloud and core infrastructures to run its system. 2. Majority of its revenue directly comes from owned and operated properties, such as Search and YouTube Ads. 3. Chrome and Android have been key strategical components for being independent from other platforms. Google Ads won't be profitable as is if other OS/browser had 100% market dominance. If you includes all of them, I think it's more of 6~70k employees rather than 10k.
- scarmig 6y agoAds doesn't depend on GCP at all.
- suprfsat 6y agoIt just runs on the cloud
- est31 6y agoWhat stops them from running it in AWS or Azure?
- scarmig 6y agoHuge, sophisticated infra investment that trumps anything MS or Amazon have on offer. No, k8s doesn't compare, and neither MS nor Amazon even have the physical machines to handle existing ads and search traffic without a multi-year, 11-figure data center build out.
- summerlight 6y agoCloud infrastructure doesn't necessarily mean only GCP as a product, but all the computing and network resources shared across the fleet.