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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

#51

Post by educar »

kumarm wrote: post #41
educar wrote: post #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…

>>Email will no see decent progress thanks to gmail. I remember how great email was before GMail: 1. Every few days I had delete emails so that I can get new email. 2. Delete sent mail immediately to make space for new emails. 3. More than 50% of emails received are spam. Yeah right GMail was one that stopped progress of email :)

As I noted, Google makes great products including gmail. My point was that with gmail being free and good enough, there is nobody to compete with gmail. In 2016, nobody will start an email company even though there are lots of advancements that can be made.

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

#52

Post by secfirstmd »

kumarm wrote: post #41
educar wrote: post #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…

>>Email will no see decent progress thanks to gmail. I remember how great email was before GMail: 1. Every few days I had delete emails so that I can get new email. 2. Delete sent mail immediately to make space for new emails. 3. More than 50% of emails received are spam. Yeah right GMail was one that stopped progress of email :)

Future progress though...may be very different....security and privacy considerations are hardly a good thing for GMail as a revenue source...

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

#53

Post by educar »

avar wrote: post #45
educar wrote: post #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…

Why can't they sell products and be like an Apple, Oracle, Microsoft. Econ 101 on HN again. Aside from what Google's doing. You're assuming that the value someone personally derives from using something is the value other people derive from pushing it to them. I.e. you have ads on Google, some of which cost >$10. To the companies paying for them that makes sense, because they might be selling a product that costs $50…

Nobody was questioning the economics, it's obvious why they do what they do. I was questioning the kind of company Google wants to be. It can be greater (in my eyes anyway). For example, Apple can still generate phenomenal profits just on the basis of their product and doesn't need to resort to putting ads everywhere.

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

#54

Post by doppp »

eru wrote: post #25
adevine wrote: 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.

Which ad-blocker are you using? I'm trying to find an alternative to AdBlock.

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

#55

Post by educar »

petra wrote: post #36
educar wrote: post #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…

The problem is not that nobody wants to pay, but that in the digital economy, content and many software products are relatively easy to copy. And once you got that, you know that the cheapest guy will win and take most of your customers, so why not be the cheapest guy, especially if it pays very well ? The other option is to make your product hard to copy by network effects or data collection, but again, here it's na…

I don't think it's easy to copy. I can understand that the search market is ad driven. But they have put ads in everything now. Why does gmail have ads? It's not easily copyable and people will take years to build a decent gmail competitor.

And good products that didn't have ads like google reader get shutdown :/

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

#56

Post by tommoor »

tma-1 wrote: 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…

They seem to be doing a pretty good job of diversifying? The profits haven't caught up yet, granted, but this is a company with many of the smartest people in the world working on future game-changing tech and sinking a ton of money into research. Still bullish here :)

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

#57

Post by thearn4 »

doppp wrote: post #54
eru wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Which ad-blocker are you using? I'm trying to find an alternative to AdBlock.

I'm using uBlock origin and find it much better than ABP.

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

#58

Post by bpicolo »

adevine wrote: post #24
mmanfrin wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

More likely they ran a few experiments putting more on, and the statistics said more people clicked them. I doubt it's actually that users have a preference towards paid results

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

#59

Post by bpodgursky »

tma-1 wrote: 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…

If adblocking becomes a serious problem for Google, they can (and will) block the relevant extensions in Chrome.

Also, mobile chrome (increasingly dominant worldwide) doesn't, and won't, have adblocking.

Yes, I'm ignoring numerically insignificant installs like rooted hosts redirects, firefox mobile, opera, etc. Those aren't going to impact revenue.

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

#60

Post by mediocrejoker »

avar wrote: post #45
educar wrote: post #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…

Why can't they sell products and be like an Apple, Oracle, Microsoft. Econ 101 on HN again. Aside from what Google's doing. You're assuming that the value someone personally derives from using something is the value other people derive from pushing it to them. I.e. you have ads on Google, some of which cost >$10. To the companies paying for them that makes sense, because they might be selling a product that costs $50…

Are the companies paying $10 per click? Otherwise I'm not sure you're making the appropriate comparison.
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