Quarterly: Q4 of 2021 they made $75B revenue, most of it came from Google Search, $43B up from $31.9B in Q4 2020. Youtube $8.6B of ads, Google Network $9.3B from ads.
Google cloud did $5B revenue for the quarter, up from $3.8B in Q4 2020. It lost $890m this quarter compared to $1.2B Q4 2020. "Other Services" did $8.1B revenue and "Other bets" did $181B
They have ~$140B in cash and liquid investments.
And this giant, mature company isn't sacrificing margins for top-line growth, they're actually increasing margins at the same time.
Truly breathtaking.
My own experience from Search and YouTube is that they have massively turned the knob to the right. I don't know why they are chasing revenue growth with such craze. It makes me worried that the leadership don't know what's Alphabet's next big thing so they are just milking the cow while they can.
you're sure?
I think I am very good at numbers, comparatively speaking. But these number is till mind boggling. It is hard to comprehend how and why they could continue to grow. With $140B cash while Android is still half polished. GCP not competing. And killing half a dozen random products and services from time to time.
But it's basically impossible to escape the ads on it these days, so it's not surprising.
ublock origin seems to do fine.
Unless you are suggesting that the ad-ladden SEO'd pages are their real product?
There has been a noticeable increase in ads across all their products.
It is actually both, from q3 10k:
Paid clicks change: 24% Cost-per-click change: 17%
see riku comment for more
Microsoft: $51.7 billion
Apple: $123.9 billion.
Walmart has a higher revenue than all of the above (~140 billion)
Apple: founded in 1976 (46 years old)
Microsoft: 1975 (47 years old)
Google: 1998 (24 years old)
Perhaps it might work better with a comparison to a person, like "Alphabet made so much revenue this quarter that, assuming they had no expenses, after a full year, Alphabet would have roughly as much money as Elon Musk." But maybe not, because now you've just moved the problem to understanding how rich Elon Musk is.
Roughly 10c of revenue for every person on the planet every day.
Meta $33.4 billion
Amazon $134 billion
pixel earns 100M..
Another sign of the slowing advancement in CPU power/performance?
Fair, I was thinking of this in the non-cloud perspective where efficiency improvements can push you to upgrade even if the hardware still works. In cloud provider mode it makes sense to keep it around as long as it still works and it's not too annoying to run. It doesn't really matter how (in)efficient the hardware is because you set the pricing to keep it profitable as long as someone's willing to buy it.
There is no limit to how high this will go. More and more economic activity is being funneled into these dozen or so mega-tech companies, which is how they are able to grow annual revenues at 20-40%/year despite 3% GDP growth.
Azure is usually bundled with some very profitable if stagnant pieces like Windows Server or SQL Server when reported on. You never see pure Azure numbers.
https://redmonk.com/jgovernor/2020/07/31/google-clouds-expan...
"GCP has recently announced a number of ten year transactions including wins at Deutsche Bank, Mayo Clinic, and Sabre."
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/google-to-migrate...
I wonder if Google will make any big acquisitions this year
HN and their desire for niche information is just not representative of the average human.
But agreed.
2021 was like catching lightning in a bottle[1]: because of lockdowns and WFH, 2021 was a monster of a year for online platforms at the expense of brick-and-mortar and traditional platforms. A lot of consumer and marketing dollars were redirected to online retailers/ad campaigns. All that drive-time- and ballgame placement ads went to Google/Facebook/Youtube and a thousands of other ad networks
1. Not that Google wasn't going to grow, but the ad growth was absolutely juiced. At the beginning of the pandemic, a bunch of Ads that had been filmed ended up not airing because they showed happy people outdoors, unmasked and having fun.
Somehow Google captured a lot more of that lightning than Facebook did.
"Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. startled investors with a sharper-than-expected decline in profits and a gloomy outlook in its first earnings report since Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg outlined a pivot to the metaverse."
"Meta shares plunged after the results were announced, dropping more than 20%."
"The company said it expected revenue growth to slow because users were spending less time on its more lucrative services. Meta cited inflation as a weight on advertiser spending ..."
That limit is imposed by competitors who deliver a better user experience. So far most competitors are doing a much worse job.
Microsoft should be a much bigger threat, but they seem to rely on their ability to set defaults for Windows and throw obstacles in the path of users who want to change the defaults.
That's not a better user experience, it's abuse of their dominant market position.
You would typically be right. However, the saying as of 2013 was "At any given second there is always at-least one new computer being plugged in, to support S3's growth."
> Every rack that is sitting there is an opportunity cost for another efficient or more profitable rack.
If AWS wasn't already supply side constrained on new hardware to fill new AWS data centers, you would be correct. However, they do not yet need to re-use those old racks, instead they are accelerating how many new racks they are building.
But maybe the chip crunch is a current bottleneck, or results in higher prices for new hardware? If so, there's a reason to delay upgrades and run older hardware a bit longer.
This is just guesswork. Supply crunches aren't predictable from first principles.
You could have a ton of revenue, Walmart for example, but if you have razor thin margins that revenue won't necessarily translate into giant piles of money in the bank, which in the end is what most businesses are after.
The profit margins of the business of retail is not in the MAMAA league. Being a retail middleman is simply not as profitable as what the tech companies can do because they can scale at extremely low marginal costs, and barrier to entry is very high.
Amazon’s value lies in AWS and prime video/music/logistics/platform, not the part where you buy something shipped and sold by Amazon.com. Hence why Amazon removed the button to filter searches to only items shipped and sold by amazon, and why Walmart introduced their own version of a platform where they can make money as a platform, rather than a retailer.
- did not calculate, just saying :)
Simply blocking pagead2.google.com and googlesyndicate.com will remove 50%+ of website advertising. ReGex rules allow for ads.* (etc.), and these rules apply on your entire local network. For an added bonus, you can then use your local PiHole to resolve DNS queries remotely (e.g. from your phone) — just all around an incredible product!
/r/PiHole
If you tried to acquire a similar stake in TSLA, the price would shoot up and it would cost you more. If he tried to sell all his shares, it would plummet and he’d get less out.
1: https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-tesla-share-selling-...
> Lost $890m this quarter compared to $1.2B Q4 2020
Probably not as cheap as a Pi, but more beneficial. blah blah. decisions! yay!