You hear this a lot (Google is an advertising company, they make 95% of their money from ads). But by that metric many companies are ad companies. Pretty much e

You hear this a lot (Google is an advertising company, they make 95% of their money from ads). But by that metric many companies are ad companies. Pretty much every web site on the web is just an ad company, because that is how they actually make money, most of the television and radio industries are just ad companies, because that is how they make money. From http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html if I'm reading it right, 69% of their revenue comes from ads on their own sites. For mine that deserves to be counted as "technology company revenue" not "advertising company revenue". If they didn't have their own ad arm they still would have made a big chunk of that 69% by using some other company to show ads on gmail, youtube and their search page, but if they were only an advertising company they would have just made the 27% that was pure "advertising on other sites" revenue. Just because youtube makes money by showing ads, doesn't make youtube not profitable.