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Alphabet slides 5% after missing earnings expectations on revenue of $20.3B

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Re: Alphabet slides 5% after missing earnings expectations on revenue of $20.3B

#24
post #8

"Paid clicks for Google were up 29 percent year-over-year for the first quarter" I'm amazed this trend continues. Page views almost certainly were NOT up 29% yoy. Meaning that clicks are growing faster than page views, in a big way, every single quarter, for years. That's what sets the investor expectations, but I don't see a way this trend continues forever. There's only so much room for additional ads, ad optimizat…

I imagine part of it is explained by the fact that when I did a search on a mobile device, nearly 90% of the front fold was ad. http://i.imgur.com/S5nClc4.png

Yeah, Google has really been expanding the real estate given to paid ads vs natural search results. My guess is they've seen a big shift from natural results to paid results. At some point, though, people will start to believe the value of the search page has suffered.

Re: Alphabet slides 5% after missing earnings expectations on revenue of $20.3B

#25
post #20
post #11

Long-term, I am not very bullish on Google/Alphabet. More than 90% of their profits come online advertising, something that can be easily blocked for life with a simple browser extension/plugin. Some worrying figures[1]: * US ad blocking grew by 48% to reach 45 million active users in 12 months up to June 2015. * Ad blocking grew by 41% globally in the last 12 months. * US ad blocking grew by 48% to reach 45 million…

But the majority of that online advertising income comes from ads on their own search results pages, not from adsense ads.

One can still block those. My adblocker does by default.

Re: Alphabet slides 5% after missing earnings expectations on revenue of $20.3B

#26

How did they miss earnings, after buying back $2.3B of stock in Q1?

Total market capitalization is roughly $500 billion. So buying back $2.3 billion of shares only shrinks the number of shares by less than 0.5%. That improves EPS by all of about 3 cents. Not enough to matter.

Re: Alphabet slides 5% after missing earnings expectations on revenue of $20.3B

#28
post #25
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the majority of that online advertising income comes from ads on their own search results pages, not from adsense ads.

One can still block those. My adblocker does by default.

Why? Isn't that the exact time when you would want to see ads?

Re: Alphabet slides 5% after missing earnings expectations on revenue of $20.3B

#29
post #11

Long-term, I am not very bullish on Google/Alphabet. More than 90% of their profits come online advertising, something that can be easily blocked for life with a simple browser extension/plugin. Some worrying figures[1]: * US ad blocking grew by 48% to reach 45 million active users in 12 months up to June 2015. * Ad blocking grew by 41% globally in the last 12 months. * US ad blocking grew by 48% to reach 45 million…

>More than 90% of their profits come online advertising, something that can be easily blocked for life with a simple browser extension/plugin.

If I were Tim Cook, I'd be at least a little tempted to update iOS and OSX to include adblocking on by default.

Re: Alphabet slides 5% after missing earnings expectations on revenue of $20.3B

#30
So, Google makes fantastic products. Much of our online interaction involves Google in some way or the other. And the only way these guys have figured to make money is ads.

Why can't they sell products and be like an Apple, Oracle, Microsoft. I am guessing it's too much work to grow in such a massive pace without ads. Ads are a marketers/sales persons dream and these marketers are very likely to spend money.

This ad economy is so very sad and it's killed many nice things. Everyone is just giving out things for free and nobody wants to pay for anything thanks to this whole ad economy. News reporting has gone to the dogs because nobody wants to pay. Email will no see decent progress thanks to gmail.

Anyway, I feel Google will be a much better company if it can get rid of dependence on ads but I guess it's too late now since it has to answer to shareholders and show never ending growth.

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