5 ms·

Actually, YouTube is fairly independent within Google. And Google is more of a software company with an internal ad agency.

jacques_chester 14y ago
It's pretty clear from their income statements going back to the invention of AdWords and AdSense that Google is an advertising company that dabbles in software on the side. 2010: - Advertising Revenue: $28.2B - Other Revenue: $1B 2011: - Advertising Revenue: $36.5B - Other Revenue: $1.3B 2012 (unaudited): - Advertising Revenue: $43.6B - Other Revenue: $2.3B Travel allll the way back to 2001, the earliest figures Google has published. Guess what the revenue split looks like? Yep: still an advertising company. 2001: - Advertising Revenue: $66.9M - Other Revenue: $19.4M If anything has changed it's that Google has steadily become more of an advertising company. Like Newscorp, the stuff you think they do (search/services vs news/commentary) is not actually what they get paid to do. Both Google and Newscorp make their money by using getting people to look at ads.
- cromwellian 14y ago
  The vast majority of employees at Google work on stuff unrelated to AdWords and AdSense, they work on technology, and get paid to do it and are not told to come up with new ideas for showing more ads. A tiny minority of people rake in money on ads, which frees up the vast majority of engineers to work on other stuff. AdWords and AdSense scale, they simply don't need an army of employees to maintain them, Google doesn't need 15,000 employees all working on ad serving. Like the vast vast vast majority of all consumer facing internet businesses ever created since the dawn of the Web, Google was created to do something: Search, without any clear business plan about how to make money. Most Web businesses do not charge end user fees, they are founded to get users, and either make money from ads, or get acquired by those that do. Facebook: Ads. Twitter: Ads. Yahoo: Ads. New York Times? Ads. You really think the journalists at the New York Times view themselves as working at an advertising company because that's the only way they can get paid? You think it's accurate to describe the New York Times as an Ad Agency? Much rarer do we see people saying "Facebook is just an ad company" in forums, this charge is always lobbed at Google, which says to me that there's some intellectual dishonesty going on, people with an axe to grind. Google spent nearly $7 billion on R&D in 2013. Most of this spending is targeted not at ads, but in trying to develop other lines of business with diversified revenue sources. Larry Page is not an idiot, he sees that relying on ads for 97% of your revenue is a risky proposition. It just turns out to be a hard problem to get people to pay for content now, even on mobile you can see prices being driven down to free + freemium. Unless Google wants to be an Enterprise company like Oracle (a market where people have a proven track record of throwing money at stuff), it's at the mercy of what people are willing to do, and as shown over and over again, people like get stuff for free if paid for by others (ads). Even for HBO and some other channels, the majority of media people consume, even that on "for pay" cable TV is still funded by commercial ads. You take a TV show which has a $2 million per episode budget, and you need a atleast 2 million people per week to pay $1. Now, how likely is that when many shows can't even command an audience of 1 million free viewers.
  - OGinparadise 14y ago
    The number of employees on each department, even if you knew it, is totally irrelevant. NY Times is a newspaper and totally different from Google which has Adsense, Doubleclick and Adwords. Google essentially controls online advertising and 95+% of their revenue is from....ads! Now with Google going 100% pay-to-play on eCommerce and transactional keywords it's even more of an ad company (milking the search goodwill.) You can call them whatever you want of course
    - Evbn 14y ago
      What percent of NYT revenue is from ads?
      - OGinparadise 14y ago
        "What percent of NYT revenue is from ads?" Wrong question! What % of the world's advertising does NYT control, online, offline or mobile? What advertising tools does NYT offer? What is the ratio of ads vs content on money topics on NYT?
        cromwellian 14y ago
        Before, it was "all that matters is how you are paid", now it's "let's finely slice the details of this, so as to exonerate everyone else, but still try to make Google a whipping boy." The axe needs more grinding.
        OGinparadise 14y ago
        Before, it was "all that matters is how you are paid" Said who? How about looking at what the company focuses on? Before seeing content on Google I see a billion million gazillion ads, often looking similar to organic results. A while back ads were on the page to pay the bills but now they are the main content, by design. Shopping also is 100% ads. So what company is Google again? Oh, yeah, trying to send the users to the best site asap. My @ss.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
onemorepassword 14y ago
Seems to me like the past year YouTube is being swallowed by Google+. (And with that, by the advertising company that Google so obviously has become.) Especially the way in which users are pressured into using their "real name" and the dramatic shift in discover/recommendations (from content-based to social-based) seems more than just a matter of integration. Both are things that are the opposite of what YouTube was about a until recently. Google is all about advertising. Software is just a means to that end.
bdowney 14y ago
No it isn't. It's been asked, like many other parts of the company, to integrate with the Google+ crap. How is that independent? About the article, 300m is just pocket change for Google anyway, they blew 12 billion on Motorola just to get the patents, so 300 million is not going to make a difference for them even if it fails miserably.
- cloudwalking 14y ago
  Actually they blew $12 billion on Motorola for a hardware manufacturing company (tooling, personnel, supply chain, patents, etc), and $6 billion in cash.

jacques_chester 14y ago

It's pretty clear from their income statements going back to the invention of AdWords and AdSense that Google is an advertising company that dabbles in software on the side. 2010: - Advertising Revenue: $28.2B - Other Revenue: $1B 2011: - Advertising Revenue: $36.5B - Other Revenue: $1.3B 2012 (unaudited): - Advertising Revenue: $43.6B - Other Revenue: $2.3B Travel allll the way back to 2001, the earliest figures Google has published. Guess what the revenue split looks like? Yep: still an advertising company. 2001: - Advertising Revenue: $66.9M - Other Revenue: $19.4M If anything has changed it's that Google has steadily become more of an advertising company. Like Newscorp, the stuff you think they do (search/services vs news/commentary) is not actually what they get paid to do. Both Google and Newscorp make their money by using getting people to look at ads.

cromwellian 14y ago
The vast majority of employees at Google work on stuff unrelated to AdWords and AdSense, they work on technology, and get paid to do it and are not told to come up with new ideas for showing more ads. A tiny minority of people rake in money on ads, which frees up the vast majority of engineers to work on other stuff. AdWords and AdSense scale, they simply don't need an army of employees to maintain them, Google doesn't need 15,000 employees all working on ad serving. Like the vast vast vast majority of all consumer facing internet businesses ever created since the dawn of the Web, Google was created to do something: Search, without any clear business plan about how to make money. Most Web businesses do not charge end user fees, they are founded to get users, and either make money from ads, or get acquired by those that do. Facebook: Ads. Twitter: Ads. Yahoo: Ads. New York Times? Ads. You really think the journalists at the New York Times view themselves as working at an advertising company because that's the only way they can get paid? You think it's accurate to describe the New York Times as an Ad Agency? Much rarer do we see people saying "Facebook is just an ad company" in forums, this charge is always lobbed at Google, which says to me that there's some intellectual dishonesty going on, people with an axe to grind. Google spent nearly $7 billion on R&D in 2013. Most of this spending is targeted not at ads, but in trying to develop other lines of business with diversified revenue sources. Larry Page is not an idiot, he sees that relying on ads for 97% of your revenue is a risky proposition. It just turns out to be a hard problem to get people to pay for content now, even on mobile you can see prices being driven down to free + freemium. Unless Google wants to be an Enterprise company like Oracle (a market where people have a proven track record of throwing money at stuff), it's at the mercy of what people are willing to do, and as shown over and over again, people like get stuff for free if paid for by others (ads). Even for HBO and some other channels, the majority of media people consume, even that on "for pay" cable TV is still funded by commercial ads. You take a TV show which has a $2 million per episode budget, and you need a atleast 2 million people per week to pay $1. Now, how likely is that when many shows can't even command an audience of 1 million free viewers.
- OGinparadise 14y ago
  The number of employees on each department, even if you knew it, is totally irrelevant. NY Times is a newspaper and totally different from Google which has Adsense, Doubleclick and Adwords. Google essentially controls online advertising and 95+% of their revenue is from....ads! Now with Google going 100% pay-to-play on eCommerce and transactional keywords it's even more of an ad company (milking the search goodwill.) You can call them whatever you want of course
  - Evbn 14y ago
    What percent of NYT revenue is from ads?
    - OGinparadise 14y ago
      "What percent of NYT revenue is from ads?" Wrong question! What % of the world's advertising does NYT control, online, offline or mobile? What advertising tools does NYT offer? What is the ratio of ads vs content on money topics on NYT?
      - cromwellian 14y ago
        Before, it was "all that matters is how you are paid", now it's "let's finely slice the details of this, so as to exonerate everyone else, but still try to make Google a whipping boy." The axe needs more grinding.
        OGinparadise 14y ago
        Before, it was "all that matters is how you are paid" Said who? How about looking at what the company focuses on? Before seeing content on Google I see a billion million gazillion ads, often looking similar to organic results. A while back ads were on the page to pay the bills but now they are the main content, by design. Shopping also is 100% ads. So what company is Google again? Oh, yeah, trying to send the users to the best site asap. My @ss.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

onemorepassword 14y ago

Seems to me like the past year YouTube is being swallowed by Google+. (And with that, by the advertising company that Google so obviously has become.) Especially the way in which users are pressured into using their "real name" and the dramatic shift in discover/recommendations (from content-based to social-based) seems more than just a matter of integration. Both are things that are the opposite of what YouTube was about a until recently. Google is all about advertising. Software is just a means to that end.

bdowney 14y ago

No it isn't. It's been asked, like many other parts of the company, to integrate with the Google+ crap. How is that independent? About the article, 300m is just pocket change for Google anyway, they blew 12 billion on Motorola just to get the patents, so 300 million is not going to make a difference for them even if it fails miserably.

cloudwalking 14y ago
Actually they blew $12 billion on Motorola for a hardware manufacturing company (tooling, personnel, supply chain, patents, etc), and $6 billion in cash.