Alphabet slides 5% after missing earnings expectations on revenue of $20.3B • Hacker News Board

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

#101

Post by baudehlo » Fri, Apr 22, 2016, 1:30 AM UTC

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 :)

You honestly had really shitty spam blocking before. That's all. Nothing more. They didn't invent spam free email.

My morning routine involves marking at least ten emails as spam on my gmail account. They really aren't the be all and end all of spam blocking.

My non-gmail account (on an address that has been around for almost a decade before gmail existed) running a more modern anti spam solution, not nearly as bad.

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

#102

Post by bigdubs » Fri, Apr 22, 2016, 1:34 AM UTC

tcbawo wrote: post #71

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…

You can't block ads with streaming services or other captive audiences. They seen well positioned in this regard.

UBlock origin blocks youtube ads, if that's what you were referring to by "streaming services".

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

#103

Post by MikeHolman » Fri, Apr 22, 2016, 1:35 AM UTC

ryanobjc wrote: post #50

dendory wrote: post #23

It's interesting to see how Google, a company that has arguably some of the best engineers in the world and the most brilliant technologists, still only makes a decent revenue on online ads. All of their other startups are losing money.

Why, you're right - somehow another $20b a quarter business has eluded them! They're normally just all over the place, I have a few in my couch at home. So weird. And yeah, all those other 'bets' - losing money. New things are usually immediately hugely profitable, and even thinking about trying something that doesnt make huge bank right out the gate makes 0 sense. This is in stark contrast to winning companies such…

I assume you're being sarcastic, but Microsoft has done a pretty good job diversifying. Office, Windows, Azure, SQL, Surface, Xbox, even Bing contribute significantly to the bottom line.

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

#104

Post by bobdole1234 » Fri, Apr 22, 2016, 1:39 AM UTC

rhino369 wrote: post #29

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…

>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.

The Google infrastructure now powers a chunk of icloud.

I don't see apple killing the revenue stream that feeds their bottomless pool of capacity.

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

#105

Post by prostoalex » Fri, Apr 22, 2016, 1:39 AM UTC

f_allwein wrote: post #98

adventured wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Self driving cars: imagine you could just tap a button on your phone and a car came along to take you to your destination - you would not need to own a car anymore and instead pay a monthly fee to Alphabet (or whoever). The fee will be even lower if you agree to watch ads during the ride. ;-) But the big opportunity is that they could offer you a car-as-a-service for much less than the current cost of a car. Today's…

If you look at the financials of car rental companies, markets are not too eager to pay premium for a business that has high upfront capital cost (buying/manufacturing the vehicles) as well as high operating costs (car washes, maintenance, repairs). You could argue that Alphabet's margins will be so good as to obliterate those concerns, but then why haven't other operators in the space (GM owns some car rental businesses, for instance) boasted those?

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

#106

Post by newjersey » Fri, Apr 22, 2016, 1:47 AM UTC

empath75 wrote: post #92

diffraction wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I block ads because "native" ad producers like Taboola, Outbrain, Revcontent, ... you get the point. These advertising companies like to show NSFW content at the end of news articles at some sites. Therefore I block ads for the same reason I block pornographic sites. This was pretty liberating because before "native" ads I felt a pang of guilt for blocking ads. If Google wants to stop ad blockers they should hide sit…

That would bring an antitrust lawsuit against them pretty quickly, I think.

This is probably the worst thing about being influential and/or wealthy. Nobody would sue opera if they did it.

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

#107

Post by arthurcolle » Fri, Apr 22, 2016, 1:54 AM UTC

empath75 wrote: post #93

wstrange wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloud. 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.

If the ads business goes to shit, the cloud business takes a beating, also.

Cloud is basically SaaS which is the antithesis of the advertisement model.

But okay, I guess you must know better.

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

#108

Post by vgeek » Fri, Apr 22, 2016, 1:55 AM UTC

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.

For the last ~2 years Google has been rolling out changes slightly before earnings are released each quarter. For example, the yellow Ad label a few months ago, and it is likely to switch to Green to blend in with the Advertiser's Display URL.

Last week Google Maps Ads switched status from being in Search Partners to being included in ALL AdWords campaigns with Location Ad Extensions. Now Google is displaying ads in Map search results. There are also 4 results on top, 3 on bottom with no sidebar, this reduced inventory in an attempt to drive up CPCs. I've seen CPCs increase 10-15% because of this over the last month. There are also queries that return 7 paid results and only 9 organic results.

Google isn't innovating, they're just making ads appear as similar to organic results as humanly possible (if you're a webmaster, you'll get penalized for this) and making sure ads are everywhere possible. Baidu's results have paid listings interspersed without labels, which is what Google is on track to do within 2 years. They're great at equivocating. They penalize sites that build links, yet they themselves send emails soliciting KW heavy anchor text to Play vendors. They'll also look the other way if you're a Google Ventures funded company caught blatantly "spamming", a la Thumbtack and Nest.

Mobile CPCs are still roughly 30% lower than desktop, but it doesn't convert nearly as well, so it is worth less. As already mentioned, Google isn't growing search volume, rather increasing the number of ads they're showing, so say 7 ads per page on 1st, 2nd and 3rd pages of results, versus 13 on 1st page and 3 on 2nd, none on 3rd. If your organic results just happen to get worse, users have to dig deeper into the SERPs to find what they're looking for, while also driving an increase in impressions.

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

#109

Post by albasha » Fri, Apr 22, 2016, 2:08 AM UTC

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…

Good luck blocking mobile ads :/

Unlike desktop, they control Android and its ecosystem. They just won't make it easy to block them.

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

#110

Post by bitmapbrother » Fri, Apr 22, 2016, 2:10 AM UTC

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…

Amusing to say the least. They made nearly 2 Billion more than Microsoft in income this quarter and their Play store made more than 2 Billion in revenue. Ad blocking isn't really a concern. When that day does materialize then Google will simply circumvent them.