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Alphabet’s Profit Falls 34% (fourth consecutive drop) Amid Ads Slowdown
- tomcam 4y agoImagine Alphabet’s bottom line if one could audit their ad network
- 1123581321 4y agoProbably higher since more ad spend would flow to them from less rigorously segmented and fraud-protected junk.
- akmarinov 4y agoImagine if Apple’s profit was down 34% for even one quarter let alone fourth consecutive drop. There would be a million articles declaring them dead, the iPhone being just a fad, etc, etc Google does it - all good
- mulmen 4y agoEarlier today I was watching a legaleagle video about Alex Jones' argument that he has to keep pitching dietary supplements to pay his civil debts. YouTube interrupted this video to play an ad for... dietary supplements. Great work. I'm sure Alphabet will be fine.
- twayt 4y agoAnd your point is?
- deadlydose 4y ago> I'm sure Alphabet will be fine.
- twayt 4y agoThat’s the conclusion, not the reasoning.
- mirekrusin 4y agoWhy are you using youtube without ad blocker?
- kylehotchkiss 4y agoBecause Apple TV :(
- mirekrusin 4y agoYou can install pi-hole and have your apple tv, you wife's phone and kids tablets sorted out.
- lamontcg 4y agodoes pi-hole work for youtube ads on chromecast?
- mirekrusin 4y agoChromecast has hardcoded google DNS but it only adds bit of complication, you can do it, internet is your friend.
- lamontcg 4y agoYeah except youtube ads cannot be DNS blocked and require something running on the device like ublock origin. From the pi-hole FAQ: https://discourse.pi-hole.net/t/how-do-i-block-ads-on-youtube/253 https://discourse.pi-hole.net/t/how-do-i-block-ads-on-youtub...
- smith7018 4y agoNo, no it doesn't work on Chromecast or Apple TV. OP is wrong.
- andsoitis 4y ago> On Thursday, the company posted its fourth consecutive decline in profit as it grapples with a slowdown in digital advertising. Layoffs as a means of cost reduction to stem the tide seems very rational.
- kibwen 4y agoThe beatings will continue until executive compensation improves.
- dtyy568 4y agoShouldn't they instead punish those who inadequately planned for this?
- twelve40 4y agoyup. People make it sound like it's impossible to predict the market. On the other hand, what is the logic in overhiring - we expect search revenue (bulk of the revenue) to spike in the next few years, so we will hire 50,000 more engineers to... do what? build more search that's already built? and if things don't work out, we'll just get rid of them?
- HWR_14 4y agoMore likely the post-pandemic all digital world didn't happen, so they can drop to still higher than 20% more than 2020 employee count and be fine.
- loveparade 4y agoThe fact that the ad model has worked so well is always a nice reminder of how much of a bubble I live in. Personally I have never intentionally clicked on a Google/YouTube/etc ad. Never. I wonder if the general population has been getting more tech-savvy and skeptical of ads over time, but this change takes a very long time to play out. I sometimes see my dad clicking on ads because he doesn't understand the mechanics behind them, but he'll die pretty soon, and a younger more tech-savvy generation will replace him.
- wodenokoto 4y agoPeople say the same thing about billboard and TV advertisement. Yet they work very well.
- FpUser 4y ago>" have never intentionally clicked on a Google/YouTube/etc ad" Same here
- tsss 4y agoI intentionally click on Google Image ads quite often. When you're looking for furniture or art they're quite relevant.
- poisonborz 4y agoAds are becoming way more complex entities than a banner/image that you click on. Companies are recognizing this and investing accordingly - think of influencer sponsorships, video inserts, in-game tokens, campaign based mobile apps. There are constantly more pipes to market through, there is restructuring the same way billboard/print advertising started to drop in the 2000s.
- mancerayder 4y agoIt's not clicking. It's that it may have popped up somewhere in your awareness, the industry calls this an impression. That's monetized along with that space on the sides and within articles and content. It's like real estate that this industry trades at low latency.
- m348e912 4y ago
- shrubble 4y agoIt couldn't possibly be because the google search engine produces pretty bad results these days, could it?
- dougmwne 4y agoWell it’s possible! Solid user traffic numbers are hard to come by these days, but the anecdotes about search result pages full of trash keep piling up. I doubt my usage has changed much, but I’m ripe for poaching over to a better product. Google is in danger of being disrupted.
- abandonliberty 4y agoIs there a better alternative? I keep putting !g into ddg. Maybe the old internet is dying and everyone is moving to the winners. Facebook, Amazon, Tiktok, snap, etc. Who needs the internet anymore? Will all the cool people leave so we can have it back?
- jemmyw 4y agoI've been using kagi a paid search service. It's good, better than ddg. It doesn't have ads and the results are better for my location, I don't have to add "NZ" to every query to get the NZ sites at the top, which I do with Google, even though it knows my location.
- carabiner 4y agoWhat is the chance that adtech is all a house of cards? Meaning that all of the "precision targeting" for segmenting married men over 30 who speak German and English while having house cats doesn't work at all? For a while, I was getting ads on Instagram in Spanish, and I don't speak Spanish.
- andsoitis 4y agoIf someone clicks on an ad, don’t you think it is because it resonated with them? Even from first principles, it stands to reason that the more precisely you can craft a message (e.g. an ad) for your audience, the higher the chances that it would resonate, and be something you can monetize.
- lmm 4y agoMaybe. Or maybe there's an uncanny valley effect where overly personal ads seem intrusive, and something that plainly describes the product will appeal more. Even if there is an improvement, is it a big enough improvement to be worth paying for?
- adrianmsmith 4y agoThat does indeed stand to reason. But GP got an advert in a language they didn't speak, so they are arguing that even if great targeting would improve ad conversion/monetization, after the > 1 decade of this being worked on, targeting doesn't really work. And I tend to agree, I am in the minority who always clicks "accept all cookies", primarily because if I have to consume ads then they might as well be relevant to me. But they are very often not relevant at all, e.g. for cars (I live in a city with great public transport and have no desire to drive) etc.
- charlieyu1 4y agoDo they really think there is an infinite growth in ads
- Master_Odin 4y agoIt certainly feels to me like a lot of tech companies believe there's infinite growth in every domain.
- threadweaver34 4y agoThey named the company Google, not Tencent for a reason.
- charlieyu1 4y agoBut the companies paying for the ads don’t have that money
- vdchuyen 4y ago[dead]
- seydor 4y agoSo where is the ad spend going instead?
- smt88 4y agoAt a lot of companies, it isn't going anywhere. Many ads offer no ROI.
- pfraze 4y agoPossibly nowhere. Advertisers reduce ad-spend when recessions are in the air.
- threadweaver34 4y agoThere's also a shift away from products to services, but I'm not sure how different those ads yield for Google. I assume ecommerce does better because it's easier to track conversions.
- deelowe 4y agoEveryone is building their own ad platforms now. I hear even kroger has one.
- seydor 4y agoso for common web folk, what are the adsense alternatives now
- Ekaros 4y agoInflation also. If the ones buying adds have not managed to fully transfer their input cost increases to output price. They have to cut that money from somewhere. And adds are pretty reasonable place as it is not mandatory to function in short term. And elsewhere, you have VC driven companies who have tougher situation for getting money to burn on adds for growth.
- marsven_422 4y ago[dead]
- shmde 4y agoGood, hope me installing ad blockers on my parents, partners, friends laptops contributed to that drop.
- HWR_14 4y agoHow did Meta do so well and Alphabet do so poorly on revenue?
- FredPret 4y agoAs a small startup founder, Facebook ads are easier and work way better than Google ads. So much so that I’ve wondered how on Earth Google gets any business; even Reddit ads are easier to set up and work better. Facebook ads are still expensive mind you.
- twelve40 4y agoFB works when you don't have a strong need to target specific keywords. If you do, there is really no substitute no matter how ugly the UI (maybe that's why it's ugly, too)
- threadweaver34 4y agoMeta started getting beat up about a quarter before Alphabet. They were 6 months ahead on a hiring freeze, and 3 months ahead on layoffs. They've been thinking about this a lot longer, and markets respond to if you beat the number the market was expecting, not if you beat internal or external forecasts.
- shostack 4y agoHow is the number the market was expecting different from an external forecast?
- threadweaver34 4y ago"The market" is a bunch of people and computers all making their own guesses that may or may not agree with with the guesses expert analysts make.
- DeRock 4y agoThey didn’t? Metas revenue was down year over year for the latest quarter, whereas googles grew. Net income for the same quarter was down 55% for meta, as compared to down 34% for google (the headline of the featured article you are commenting on).
- harry8 4y agoIn other news Google's search continues to get worse at finding what you want. Randomly dropping words from your query, even when you quote them and + and allintext, even when they claim they haven't ctrl+f shows the word ain't in the result. They just want to get the easy money of you clicking the ad for $someco that they put in before the "i'm feeling lucky" spot where $someco should be. Want to find something you know you read a couple of months ago and recall a lot of details about? Good luck. Not sure what the best search engine is for that but it seems it is no longer google. Are these twin declines, service quality and revenue somehow causally related? If so in which direction?
- mancerayder 4y agoHonestly it should be viewed as a utility at this point rather than a private company with too many rights. It's critical to find businesses, medical information, hell, you can say democracy itself can be affected by what happens in search results. Google is treading a fine line. I imagine the smart people in the room know their days of infinite monopoly are numbered.
- bamboozled 4y agoI basically just search Reddit now, using Google.
- dgb23 4y agoInteresting, I specifically do that in order to get a general feeling of what people think of a topic. Reddit is moderated and curated. Makes sense that it’s often more useful than say, SEO spam. However please note that there’s a ton of advertising hidden in sheep’s skin.
- tarsinge 4y agoOne caveat is that you have to pay attention on which subreddit you are to be sure you get a real variety of opinion and are just not in an echo chamber with bot parroting the current "wisdom" of that sub to farm karma. I've seen a lot of small subreddits make full 180 regarding a product or practice after a few months / years when the hype is gone.
- zxcvbn4038 4y agoYou can’t really feel sorry for them, they could turn this around in a heartbeat by being more customer focused.
- yegle 4y agoFWIW, consumers (users of Chrome/Android/Gmail etc) are not Google's customers. Advertisers/Google Workspace users/GCP users are.
- seunosewa 4y agoMany consumers have signed up for google cloud storage for their mail and photos. They are google's customers too.
- kenhwang 4y ago> Advertisers/Google Workspace users/GCP users are. They treat those customers worse than Android customers. At least Android has human customer service. If you self-served your way into those advertising/workspace/GCP and didn't sign a paper contract guaranteeing a human client executive and support, support is gonna be zilch.
- Simon_O_Rourke 4y agoMore layoffs coming down the line in Google so!
- Coronon 4y ago[dead]
- WirelessGigabit 4y agoI wonder when we'll start holding Google response for the ads they serve. Lately there were ads for fake Blender and Rufus which installed some malware. How can they not be held liable for that?
- jasmer 4y agoThis is possibly an existential moment for many of us, a feeling we have not had in a long while; Google, since probably 2007-ish has been 'unnassailable'. This could be shift in market conditions and internal cultural conditions, combined with exernal threats like ChatGPT ... I suggest they will linger on a very long while, but we could be in a 'new era' wherein there can be legit competition on a number of surrounding things because they just are not good enough anymore to do it all.