8 ms·

Google stock spikes after reporting better than expected Q2 earnings

90 points by zhuxuefeng1994 11y ago

aresant 11y ago
"On the conference call, Ms. Porat noted that mobile cost per clicks continued to strengthen, and that the gap between desktop and mobile is narrowing." (1) It's no surprise that after the "mobilepocalypse" earlier this year we're seeing mobile profitability grow for Google. Google effectively forced advertisers hands in bundling their inventory and is agressively raising min CPC in a number of categories (2) And they are breaking many of their OWN rules about how aggressively one can promote advertising on mobile - excellent, and entertaining breakdown of that here -> http://www.seobook.com/google-goes-mobile-unfriendly http://www.seobook.com/google-goes-mobile-unfriendly I don't have much of a point other than sharing some of the information behind what's actually driving these earnings, and the major changes I've seen / experienced as a guy that spends a lot with the GOOG. (1) http://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-results-top-expectations-1437077741 http://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-results-top-expectations... (2) http://searchengineland.com/google-showing-fewer-ads-per-search-219834 http://searchengineland.com/google-showing-fewer-ads-per-sea... (3) http://www.seobook.com/google-goes-mobile-unfriendly http://www.seobook.com/google-goes-mobile-unfriendly
- choppaface 11y ago
  There's an Adobe study that shows that Google appears to be cutting impressions (of bad ads?) to boost CTRs and CPC; the same report shows Facebook is handily clobbering Google in CTR / relevance: * http://www.zdnet.com/article/googles-mobilegeddon-moves-hitting-marketers-sites/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/googles-mobilegeddon-moves-hitt... Perhaps Google is trying to boost CTR / relevance in order to attract/retain the more valuable advertisers (who would probably otherwise weight Facebook more highly for its better targeting). I really wonder how much of this growth is just Google (and Facebook) extracting more marketing dollars from the biggest spenders.
  - asuffield 11y ago
    I'll just point out that this is a graph of CTR growth y/y, not CTR. It's easy to grow faster when you're further behind.
  - choppaface 11y ago
    Woah many downvotes w/out explanation. Is there evidence that this study is bonk or did that comment just excite the mafia? I believe Facebook established during their IPO roadshow that they had superior CTRs. Edit: looking over this thread, there are several rather mild comments that got strong downvotes. Looks like the followers of this thread were indeed inordinately pro-Google.
- stvswn 11y ago
  You assert that Google is "aggressively raising min CPC in a number of categories" and then link to an article that speculates that this might be the case without evidence. They didn't even say "aggressively..." As for the third link, search ads are not the same thing as mobile display ads from the user's perspective. Remember that in the other case (mobile display ads), Google is probably selling those ads, too.
  - aaronwall 11y ago
    The assertion is 100% correct. There are other reports out there & some of them do great breakdowns of click volume, click costs, click values & so on ... based on things like: device type (desktop vs tablet vs cell phones, or even across operating systems), branded keywords vs unbranded keywords, text ads vs PLAs/shopping ads, etc. There are many such reports, but the SEM company which regularly puts out the best report on this front is RKG (which was bought out by Merkle last year http://www.merkleinc.com/news-and-events/press-releases/2014/merkle-acquires-search-digital-marketing-agency-rkg http://www.merkleinc.com/news-and-events/press-releases/2014... and even after the buyout is still putting out great reports each quarter). RKG's most recent report is downloadable here http://www.rimmkaufman.com/digital-marketing-report/ http://www.rimmkaufman.com/digital-marketing-report/ & it is something I read (and recommend) every quarter. :) In the report, they stated they saw Google dramatically increase minimum CPC on own brand keywords over the past year, that brand keyword cost was up 39% YoY, and that Google was now charging brands more for clicks on their own brand terms than Bing does. You can see a quick review of their report here http://searchengineland.com/us-paid-search-growing-but-at-slower-rate-google-brand-cpcs-surge-report-225348 http://searchengineland.com/us-paid-search-growing-but-at-sl... And there might be multiple factors in Google showing fewer ads. Some general assertions and/or hypothesis on potential drivers... A rise in minimum CPCs on brand keywords might block out some of the lower value 3rd party arbitrage on the branded terms, Google might be showing larger ads (with more ad extensions) above the organic results & fewer ads in the right sidebar, some categories might have PLAs / shopping ads performing so strong that there is less need for text ads, in some categories (like hotel search) Google has effectively turned much of the "organic" search result set into another layer of ads via their hotel price ads, Google includes affiliate links in their knowledge graph, over time more of Google's search volume is on mobile devices with a smaller SERP interface & no right rail to show ads in, over time more of Google's search volume is in emerging markets with less shallower and less mature ad markets, etc etc etc A few other things worth mentioning on their general economic trends: on smaller devices partners (outside of the big one in Apple) are easier for Google to squeeze out & represent a smaller share of Google's ad revenues, over the last couple years the partner network keeps comprising a smaller percent of Google's overall ad revenue (numerous sources on this front, like http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2013/10/analysis_what_future.php http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2013/10/anal... & http://blog.pagefair.com/2014/adsense-smoking-gun/ http://blog.pagefair.com/2014/adsense-smoking-gun/ ), Google is getting higher revenue from clicks on Google.com & their regional search properties but the YouTube pre-roll ads generally go for less money (since they are earlier in the consumer funnel than search is & have less intent than a search does) & drag down the aggregate click price (because Google counts YouTube video ad views as clicks). One other thing worth mentioning in terms of mobile is that while the mobile click values (and thus CPCs) are lower, Google offsets that by dominating the mobile interface with ads. 3 years back I wrote this post http://www.seobook.com/mobile-seo http://www.seobook.com/mobile-seo highlighting how Google had over double the CTR on mobile search ads as they did on desktop search ads. The top graph from that post came from an RKG quarterly report for that quarter.
- roghummal 11y ago
  The golden rule! He who has the something something something something etc. Don't know, don't care.
- Steko 11y ago
  That seobook post has some gems: https://twitter.com/danbarker/status/439125570115223552/photo/1 https://twitter.com/danbarker/status/439125570115223552/phot...
  - JimmaDaRustla 11y ago
    Well, Google doesn't need to increase their search engine ranking... And they link directly to Wikipedia, driving traffic to their site, so they're not really wrongfully stealing the data.
    - choppaface 11y ago
      Google displaying Wikipedia content in Knowledge Graph has resulted in a large hit to Wikipedia's traffic (20-30%). Thankfully Wikipedia said they did not see a drop in donations correlated with Google's change. However, for sites that do monetize through ads, Google's 'scraping' of the content is indeed stealing if the content would 'organically' draw more clicks otherwise.
      - aaronwall 11y ago
        After Wikia Search failed, there's no risk in Google further subsidizing the growth of Wikipedia so long as Google then gets to scrape back much of the value add via their knowledge graph & Wikia is primarily monetized via Google AdSense. It makes sense Wikimedia didn't see an immediate donation drop. In terms of a conversion funnel, the people who are using Wikipedia for the first time are not likely to donate. My guess is most of the people who are most likely to donate a small amount here or there are the regular users who regularly seek out the site. The drop in donations due to the lower exposure would take years to kick in, because now with 20% or 30% fewer users, there will also be less new future power users who would donate in say 2018 or 2019. But offsetting any decline there for a company making over a billion a month in profits shouldn't be too substantial. Sergey Brin donates a half-million a year grant to the Wikimedia foundation & Google has also donated a few million. It is also worth mentioning the knowledge graph now often contains affiliate links for things like music, ebooks, and so on. Over time more and more knowledge categories will have paid affiliate links in them (say booking a restaurant, heading to a concert, etc.) In some cases Google may temporarily make a link type free to try to drive adoption and awareness, but over time it will be the same sort of scrape-n-displace they've done with hotel bookings. They not only turned the "organic" hotel search listings into a second set of paid ads, but now they are also testing having some users convert and buy the hotel booking while on Google.com - just like they are doing with their car insurance offering. And they have also added links to cityname hotel searches in their knowledge graph in order to drive more people into that "almost nothing but ads" funnel. You can see the net effect of that sort of displacement on an industry by looking at all the consolidation in travel. Expedia acquired Travelocity and Orbitz. That leaves Expedia, Priceline & TripAdvisor as the remaining 3 big players. And even with TripAdvisor Google offered them and Yelp an ultimatum to allow Google to scrape/steal their reviews & if they wanted to opt out of that theft then they could use a robots directive to block Googlebot from indexing their site. That monopolistic abuse was so brazen it actually managed to draw the interest of regulators and politicians. Eric Schmidt did a fantastic job of misdirection & fibbing at the 2011 congressional hearing (ref http://www.benedelman.org/news/040115-1.html http://www.benedelman.org/news/040115-1.html ) but the regulatory & political reviews forced Google to back away from at least that form of monopolistic bundling. Though, of course, the same sort of behavior continues to this day in other forms. From just yesterday there's both https://twitter.com/chrispirillo/status/624630005734113280 https://twitter.com/chrispirillo/status/624630005734113280 & https://twitter.com/jeremys/status/624675646694780928 https://twitter.com/jeremys/status/624675646694780928
- justwannasing 11y ago
  And the most expensive ads are Super Bowl ads as the TV networks aggressively force the hands ... So, iow, business as usual.
hkmurakami 11y ago
Note that both GOOGL (+12% AH as of writing) and GOOG (+11% AH as of writing) both exist and are distinct. (The former has voting rights)
- r00fus 11y ago
  Is there honestly any scenario where the two won't be so closely correlated as to not be equivalent?
  - hkmurakami 11y ago
    When one of the holders of the B shares (the Google Trinity) dies and the shares are dissipated due to estate tax compliance. The A shares are essentially inconsequential right now because voting is controlled and concentrated by the B share owners.
  - nickles 11y ago
    In certain circumstances, the price of nonvoting shares may not move with the price of voting shares. Consider a circumstance in which an activist investor seeks to gain control of a company. The voting shares will rise in value as a result of increased demand for the shares, while the nonvoting shares may not move at all.
  - nostrademons 11y ago
    Imagine a case where Google's business tanks, shareholders wish to oust Larry Page, Larry & Sergey obviously won't budge, but activist shareholders manage to get Eric Schmidt on board. Eric + virtually all of the class A shares is enough to get voting control of the company (when the class C shares were created, it was because the voting rights of Larry + Sergey were just barely over 50%). In this scenario, the class C shares will fall dramatically because the financial value of Google will be nearing nothing, but it's likely that the value of class A shares will skyrocket. Because an activist needs virtually all of them to rest voting control from the founders, there's a "corner the market" situation where the last few remaining holders can demand very large prices for their shares.
arthurcolle 11y ago
Hopefully GOOG won't lose its way with its unrelenetless search for profits as opposed to incentivizing its devs to make cool products. That being said, good job new CFO
- eitally 11y ago
  I think the problem is fundamentally this: how do you decide what is a cool product, and whether to work on it or not? Subsequently, how do you sell it to the engineering & PM teams to get them to actually do it? Remember that Google doesn't really work in the same way as most product companies and these two things aren't necessarily straightforward.
  - arthurcolle 11y ago
    I mean you're right but it just sucks when you have this massive cash pile that could be used to experiment in interesting ways. Google should figure out a way to monetize that isn't just maximizing clicks and optimizing ad revenue. That's so lame. I understand that advertising (in theory) could really show you stuff that you want in your life and maybe even need, but we aren't even remotely close yet. It's clear that it's a volume "let's hit users with tons of stuff they just searched for on Amazon", not a surgical strike "let's get users to buy what they need for their own life based on all the stuff they do through our platforms" In the last three months I've noticed three string queries on Google give me back results with two strings and then one of the strings will have a strikethrough. Sometimes this spans multiple pages. This is terrible
    - jshen 11y ago
      > Google should figure out a way to monetize that isn't just maximizing clicks and optimizing ad revenue. After many years of things like 20% time, no one at Google has created anything that monetizes at a level close to ads. Why would they double down on what hasn't worked?
    - codeka 11y ago
      It's important to note that most engineers at Google don't actually work on Ads or anything to do with monetization directly. Most will be working on things like Search, Gmail, Android, Maps, Docs/Drive, YouTube, Chrome, etc etc. I'm pretty sure Google doesn't really have a plan to monetize any of those things (other than ads), but I think it's also pretty cool that a small minority of the company makes enough money to let the rest do pretty much whatever.
eitally 11y ago
I wish they split out revenue for their Enterprise (Google for Work) division.
mythz 11y ago
Google also just became the 2nd most valuable company in the world behind Apple: http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/16/google-q2-2015-earnings/#.eoqvzq:ZMhf http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/16/google-q2-2015-earnings/#.e... Which both look in great shape for the Post-PC future having control of the 2 most dominant mobile platforms.
- adam12 11y ago
  > Post-PC future I'm still not convinced.
  - mythz 11y ago
    iPhone revenue alone is bigger than the revenue of any other Technology Company.
    - soup10 11y ago
      Mobile exploding doesn't mean PC will decline. There will always be demand for larger screens, better hardware, keyboard, mice and productive as well as entertainment software that takes advantage of all that.
      - mythz 11y ago
        PC sales have been declining, for years. No-ones saying there wont be demand for PC's in future - just that the demand is lower than mobile computing devices.
        staunch 11y ago
        Laptops are mobile PCs. Smartphones are mobile PCs. VR glasses will be mobile PCs. There's nothing post-PC about mobile.
        Steko 11y ago
        Smartphones are not PCs. Redefining all these terms is a silly way to buttress your POV.
guelo 11y ago
As Youtube gets more and more annoying it makes Google more and more money. The advertising business sucks.
- jaydz 11y ago
  I'm hoping Youtube implements a subscription model. I will gladly pay to skip the 15-30 seconds ads on every video.
  - tedajax 11y ago
    I prefer to just use <insert adblocker of choice here> and support the creators I really like via donations/patreon/etc...
    - maaaats 11y ago
      > and support the creators I really like Honestly, chances are that you don't. Everyone says they will, few do.
      - ionised 11y ago
        Without knowing him personally this is just a pointless snarky comment.
      - tedajax 11y ago
        I bought 4 GameGrumps T-Shirts and I'm a Patreon on RedLetterMedia and Smarter Every Day. I can verify all of these statements.
  - bkjelden 11y ago
    My fear with this is that it'll end up like cable tv: you pay for it and you get to watch advertisements.
    - psbp 11y ago
      There's precedent with Youtube Music Key. $10/month is a lot to pay for removing ads from music videos alone, but given that it's bundled with the overall streaming service, it's a pretty good deal.

"On the conference call, Ms. Porat noted that mobile cost per clicks continued to strengthen, and that the gap between desktop and mobile is narrowing." (1) It's no surprise that after the "mobilepocalypse" earlier this year we're seeing mobile profitability grow for Google. Google effectively forced advertisers hands in bundling their inventory and is agressively raising min CPC in a number of categories (2) And they are breaking many of their OWN rules about how aggressively one can promote advertising on mobile - excellent, and entertaining breakdown of that here -> http://www.seobook.com/google-goes-mobile-unfriendly http://www.seobook.com/google-goes-mobile-unfriendly I don't have much of a point other than sharing some of the information behind what's actually driving these earnings, and the major changes I've seen / experienced as a guy that spends a lot with the GOOG. (1) http://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-results-top-expectations-1437077741 http://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-results-top-expectations... (2) http://searchengineland.com/google-showing-fewer-ads-per-search-219834 http://searchengineland.com/google-showing-fewer-ads-per-sea... (3) http://www.seobook.com/google-goes-mobile-unfriendly http://www.seobook.com/google-goes-mobile-unfriendly

choppaface 11y ago
There's an Adobe study that shows that Google appears to be cutting impressions (of bad ads?) to boost CTRs and CPC; the same report shows Facebook is handily clobbering Google in CTR / relevance: * http://www.zdnet.com/article/googles-mobilegeddon-moves-hitting-marketers-sites/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/googles-mobilegeddon-moves-hitt... Perhaps Google is trying to boost CTR / relevance in order to attract/retain the more valuable advertisers (who would probably otherwise weight Facebook more highly for its better targeting). I really wonder how much of this growth is just Google (and Facebook) extracting more marketing dollars from the biggest spenders.
- asuffield 11y ago
  I'll just point out that this is a graph of CTR growth y/y, not CTR. It's easy to grow faster when you're further behind.
- choppaface 11y ago
  Woah many downvotes w/out explanation. Is there evidence that this study is bonk or did that comment just excite the mafia? I believe Facebook established during their IPO roadshow that they had superior CTRs. Edit: looking over this thread, there are several rather mild comments that got strong downvotes. Looks like the followers of this thread were indeed inordinately pro-Google.
stvswn 11y ago
You assert that Google is "aggressively raising min CPC in a number of categories" and then link to an article that speculates that this might be the case without evidence. They didn't even say "aggressively..." As for the third link, search ads are not the same thing as mobile display ads from the user's perspective. Remember that in the other case (mobile display ads), Google is probably selling those ads, too.
- aaronwall 11y ago
  The assertion is 100% correct. There are other reports out there & some of them do great breakdowns of click volume, click costs, click values & so on ... based on things like: device type (desktop vs tablet vs cell phones, or even across operating systems), branded keywords vs unbranded keywords, text ads vs PLAs/shopping ads, etc. There are many such reports, but the SEM company which regularly puts out the best report on this front is RKG (which was bought out by Merkle last year http://www.merkleinc.com/news-and-events/press-releases/2014/merkle-acquires-search-digital-marketing-agency-rkg http://www.merkleinc.com/news-and-events/press-releases/2014... and even after the buyout is still putting out great reports each quarter). RKG's most recent report is downloadable here http://www.rimmkaufman.com/digital-marketing-report/ http://www.rimmkaufman.com/digital-marketing-report/ & it is something I read (and recommend) every quarter. :) In the report, they stated they saw Google dramatically increase minimum CPC on own brand keywords over the past year, that brand keyword cost was up 39% YoY, and that Google was now charging brands more for clicks on their own brand terms than Bing does. You can see a quick review of their report here http://searchengineland.com/us-paid-search-growing-but-at-slower-rate-google-brand-cpcs-surge-report-225348 http://searchengineland.com/us-paid-search-growing-but-at-sl... And there might be multiple factors in Google showing fewer ads. Some general assertions and/or hypothesis on potential drivers... A rise in minimum CPCs on brand keywords might block out some of the lower value 3rd party arbitrage on the branded terms, Google might be showing larger ads (with more ad extensions) above the organic results & fewer ads in the right sidebar, some categories might have PLAs / shopping ads performing so strong that there is less need for text ads, in some categories (like hotel search) Google has effectively turned much of the "organic" search result set into another layer of ads via their hotel price ads, Google includes affiliate links in their knowledge graph, over time more of Google's search volume is on mobile devices with a smaller SERP interface & no right rail to show ads in, over time more of Google's search volume is in emerging markets with less shallower and less mature ad markets, etc etc etc A few other things worth mentioning on their general economic trends: on smaller devices partners (outside of the big one in Apple) are easier for Google to squeeze out & represent a smaller share of Google's ad revenues, over the last couple years the partner network keeps comprising a smaller percent of Google's overall ad revenue (numerous sources on this front, like http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2013/10/analysis_what_future.php http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2013/10/anal... & http://blog.pagefair.com/2014/adsense-smoking-gun/ http://blog.pagefair.com/2014/adsense-smoking-gun/ ), Google is getting higher revenue from clicks on Google.com & their regional search properties but the YouTube pre-roll ads generally go for less money (since they are earlier in the consumer funnel than search is & have less intent than a search does) & drag down the aggregate click price (because Google counts YouTube video ad views as clicks). One other thing worth mentioning in terms of mobile is that while the mobile click values (and thus CPCs) are lower, Google offsets that by dominating the mobile interface with ads. 3 years back I wrote this post http://www.seobook.com/mobile-seo http://www.seobook.com/mobile-seo highlighting how Google had over double the CTR on mobile search ads as they did on desktop search ads. The top graph from that post came from an RKG quarterly report for that quarter.
roghummal 11y ago
The golden rule! He who has the something something something something etc. Don't know, don't care.
Steko 11y ago
That seobook post has some gems: https://twitter.com/danbarker/status/439125570115223552/photo/1 https://twitter.com/danbarker/status/439125570115223552/phot...
- JimmaDaRustla 11y ago
  Well, Google doesn't need to increase their search engine ranking... And they link directly to Wikipedia, driving traffic to their site, so they're not really wrongfully stealing the data.
  - choppaface 11y ago
    Google displaying Wikipedia content in Knowledge Graph has resulted in a large hit to Wikipedia's traffic (20-30%). Thankfully Wikipedia said they did not see a drop in donations correlated with Google's change. However, for sites that do monetize through ads, Google's 'scraping' of the content is indeed stealing if the content would 'organically' draw more clicks otherwise.
    - aaronwall 11y ago
      After Wikia Search failed, there's no risk in Google further subsidizing the growth of Wikipedia so long as Google then gets to scrape back much of the value add via their knowledge graph & Wikia is primarily monetized via Google AdSense. It makes sense Wikimedia didn't see an immediate donation drop. In terms of a conversion funnel, the people who are using Wikipedia for the first time are not likely to donate. My guess is most of the people who are most likely to donate a small amount here or there are the regular users who regularly seek out the site. The drop in donations due to the lower exposure would take years to kick in, because now with 20% or 30% fewer users, there will also be less new future power users who would donate in say 2018 or 2019. But offsetting any decline there for a company making over a billion a month in profits shouldn't be too substantial. Sergey Brin donates a half-million a year grant to the Wikimedia foundation & Google has also donated a few million. It is also worth mentioning the knowledge graph now often contains affiliate links for things like music, ebooks, and so on. Over time more and more knowledge categories will have paid affiliate links in them (say booking a restaurant, heading to a concert, etc.) In some cases Google may temporarily make a link type free to try to drive adoption and awareness, but over time it will be the same sort of scrape-n-displace they've done with hotel bookings. They not only turned the "organic" hotel search listings into a second set of paid ads, but now they are also testing having some users convert and buy the hotel booking while on Google.com - just like they are doing with their car insurance offering. And they have also added links to cityname hotel searches in their knowledge graph in order to drive more people into that "almost nothing but ads" funnel. You can see the net effect of that sort of displacement on an industry by looking at all the consolidation in travel. Expedia acquired Travelocity and Orbitz. That leaves Expedia, Priceline & TripAdvisor as the remaining 3 big players. And even with TripAdvisor Google offered them and Yelp an ultimatum to allow Google to scrape/steal their reviews & if they wanted to opt out of that theft then they could use a robots directive to block Googlebot from indexing their site. That monopolistic abuse was so brazen it actually managed to draw the interest of regulators and politicians. Eric Schmidt did a fantastic job of misdirection & fibbing at the 2011 congressional hearing (ref http://www.benedelman.org/news/040115-1.html http://www.benedelman.org/news/040115-1.html ) but the regulatory & political reviews forced Google to back away from at least that form of monopolistic bundling. Though, of course, the same sort of behavior continues to this day in other forms. From just yesterday there's both https://twitter.com/chrispirillo/status/624630005734113280 https://twitter.com/chrispirillo/status/624630005734113280 & https://twitter.com/jeremys/status/624675646694780928 https://twitter.com/jeremys/status/624675646694780928
justwannasing 11y ago
And the most expensive ads are Super Bowl ads as the TV networks aggressively force the hands ... So, iow, business as usual.

hkmurakami 11y ago

Note that both GOOGL (+12% AH as of writing) and GOOG (+11% AH as of writing) both exist and are distinct. (The former has voting rights)

r00fus 11y ago
Is there honestly any scenario where the two won't be so closely correlated as to not be equivalent?
- hkmurakami 11y ago
  When one of the holders of the B shares (the Google Trinity) dies and the shares are dissipated due to estate tax compliance. The A shares are essentially inconsequential right now because voting is controlled and concentrated by the B share owners.
- nickles 11y ago
  In certain circumstances, the price of nonvoting shares may not move with the price of voting shares. Consider a circumstance in which an activist investor seeks to gain control of a company. The voting shares will rise in value as a result of increased demand for the shares, while the nonvoting shares may not move at all.
- nostrademons 11y ago
  Imagine a case where Google's business tanks, shareholders wish to oust Larry Page, Larry & Sergey obviously won't budge, but activist shareholders manage to get Eric Schmidt on board. Eric + virtually all of the class A shares is enough to get voting control of the company (when the class C shares were created, it was because the voting rights of Larry + Sergey were just barely over 50%). In this scenario, the class C shares will fall dramatically because the financial value of Google will be nearing nothing, but it's likely that the value of class A shares will skyrocket. Because an activist needs virtually all of them to rest voting control from the founders, there's a "corner the market" situation where the last few remaining holders can demand very large prices for their shares.

arthurcolle 11y ago

Hopefully GOOG won't lose its way with its unrelenetless search for profits as opposed to incentivizing its devs to make cool products. That being said, good job new CFO

eitally 11y ago
I think the problem is fundamentally this: how do you decide what is a cool product, and whether to work on it or not? Subsequently, how do you sell it to the engineering & PM teams to get them to actually do it? Remember that Google doesn't really work in the same way as most product companies and these two things aren't necessarily straightforward.
- arthurcolle 11y ago
  I mean you're right but it just sucks when you have this massive cash pile that could be used to experiment in interesting ways. Google should figure out a way to monetize that isn't just maximizing clicks and optimizing ad revenue. That's so lame. I understand that advertising (in theory) could really show you stuff that you want in your life and maybe even need, but we aren't even remotely close yet. It's clear that it's a volume "let's hit users with tons of stuff they just searched for on Amazon", not a surgical strike "let's get users to buy what they need for their own life based on all the stuff they do through our platforms" In the last three months I've noticed three string queries on Google give me back results with two strings and then one of the strings will have a strikethrough. Sometimes this spans multiple pages. This is terrible
  - jshen 11y ago
    > Google should figure out a way to monetize that isn't just maximizing clicks and optimizing ad revenue. After many years of things like 20% time, no one at Google has created anything that monetizes at a level close to ads. Why would they double down on what hasn't worked?
  - codeka 11y ago
    It's important to note that most engineers at Google don't actually work on Ads or anything to do with monetization directly. Most will be working on things like Search, Gmail, Android, Maps, Docs/Drive, YouTube, Chrome, etc etc. I'm pretty sure Google doesn't really have a plan to monetize any of those things (other than ads), but I think it's also pretty cool that a small minority of the company makes enough money to let the rest do pretty much whatever.

eitally 11y ago

I wish they split out revenue for their Enterprise (Google for Work) division.

mythz 11y ago

Google also just became the 2nd most valuable company in the world behind Apple: http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/16/google-q2-2015-earnings/#.eoqvzq:ZMhf http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/16/google-q2-2015-earnings/#.e... Which both look in great shape for the Post-PC future having control of the 2 most dominant mobile platforms.

adam12 11y ago
> Post-PC future I'm still not convinced.
- mythz 11y ago
  iPhone revenue alone is bigger than the revenue of any other Technology Company.
  - soup10 11y ago
    Mobile exploding doesn't mean PC will decline. There will always be demand for larger screens, better hardware, keyboard, mice and productive as well as entertainment software that takes advantage of all that.
    - mythz 11y ago
      PC sales have been declining, for years. No-ones saying there wont be demand for PC's in future - just that the demand is lower than mobile computing devices.
      - staunch 11y ago
        Laptops are mobile PCs. Smartphones are mobile PCs. VR glasses will be mobile PCs. There's nothing post-PC about mobile.
        Steko 11y ago
        Smartphones are not PCs. Redefining all these terms is a silly way to buttress your POV.

guelo 11y ago

As Youtube gets more and more annoying it makes Google more and more money. The advertising business sucks.

jaydz 11y ago
I'm hoping Youtube implements a subscription model. I will gladly pay to skip the 15-30 seconds ads on every video.
- tedajax 11y ago
  I prefer to just use <insert adblocker of choice here> and support the creators I really like via donations/patreon/etc...
  - maaaats 11y ago
    > and support the creators I really like Honestly, chances are that you don't. Everyone says they will, few do.
    - ionised 11y ago
      Without knowing him personally this is just a pointless snarky comment.
    - tedajax 11y ago
      I bought 4 GameGrumps T-Shirts and I'm a Patreon on RedLetterMedia and Smarter Every Day. I can verify all of these statements.
- bkjelden 11y ago
  My fear with this is that it'll end up like cable tv: you pay for it and you get to watch advertisements.
  - psbp 11y ago
    There's precedent with Youtube Music Key. $10/month is a lot to pay for removing ads from music videos alone, but given that it's bundled with the overall streaming service, it's a pretty good deal.