81–90 of 203 posts
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>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.
Isn't that what happened in iOS9 with the Safari Content Blocker framework?
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…
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…
I don't think ad blocking represents armageddon for Google.
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Google would have no problem forcing ads into the main SERP hose if it came to Microsoft or Apple blocking by default.
Any attempt to do that, would result in two likely outcomes: 1) It would create a bad product, according to Google's own prior statements on the matter. 2) It would encourage government authorities to look even closer at potential abuses toward consumers (ie what kind of consumer harm is occurring, if any, when a monopoly search provider prevents attempts by consumers to use ad blockers; that would have to be resolve…
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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 :)
They are doing a poor job of diversifying. Those side businesses are producing a small amount of revenue. It would be one thing if the profits hadn't caught up, the real problem is there isn't much in the way of sales to begin with. I see no example business of theirs that will get them even moderately diversified off of online advertising in the next five years. And I'm not speaking of technology Alphabet is messing…
I think they are very serious about becoming the market leader in this space. They are behind AWS, but if they can leverage the same technology that they use internally, they will have a compelling offering.
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This would be a good thing in the long run. It would open the door to paid services that could be competitive. Currently YouTube is free and there are no consequences for blocking ads. It's funny, I didn't even realize that YouTube had ads until I turned off my ad blocker one day. I was amazed at how awful the experience was...
I think you can pay to disable ads on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/red
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Fiber infrastructure is expensive.
Did they invest a lot on fibre infrastructure? There are only in a couple of smallish cities and towns and most of their service deployment is based on existing infrastructure, AFAIK. Maybe I have missed something...
(from Q4 2015)
"In the earnings announcement this week, Alphabet (the parent company of Google) shared that most of it’s $869 million in capital spend on “Other Bets” went to Google Fiber, according to CFO Ruth Porat, and that Google Fiber would continue to be a driver of CapEx spending going forward."
https://abc.xyz/investor/news/earnings/2015/Q4_google_earnin...
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 :)
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Its hard to believe, because tracking and especially tracking over search history both over the immediate term and the somewhat longer term is exactly what enables Google to surface such good results.
I understand the theory behind all that but I'm preferring the results DDG is now giving me. The bangs feature is also really nice. I actually used DuckDuckGo about a year ago but I went back to Google after a month as the results felt crap, but I gave it a try recently and haven't looked back. I haven't felt this was since leaving Altavista!
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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 :)
It just shows that the smartest people in the world working on cool tech doesn't necessarily mean business success. It's a different kind of smarts.
I think in these kinds of conversations we sometimes lose a little perspective.