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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

#171

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

jacobwcarlson wrote: post #95
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…

> https://blog.pagefair.com/2015/ad-blocking-report/ Can anyone shed light on the relatively widespread adoption of ad blocking software in Poland and Greece? A cursory search doesn't indicate any particular bandwidth or cost constraints.

My guess is TV rights. All of the streaming sites have a very heavy ad-load, and are nigh-unusable without an ad-blocker. Poland and Greece probably aren't particularly profitable markets, so translations/releases may be delayed, creating demand for the streaming services and as a consequence pushing up ad-blocking.

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

#172

Post by trhway »

themartorana wrote: post #117
maxxxxx wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, my post was not complete. No doubt they are doing great with their ad business. But they seem to struggle with making money from any of the other things they do. And to justify their valuation at some point they have make massive amounts of profit. Much more than they do now. So it seems to me that some of the smartest guys doing the coolest tech in the world is not sufficient to making money.

The struggle is moving the relative needle. I doubt they have trouble making money, but is it going to move that $20.3B number? Because in order to actually move it, it needs minimum revenues of $100,000,000. I'm sure they make money in other pursuits (I'm sure GCE is doing some, and I hear their government contracts are sizable) but $100m just to tick up the revenue decimal point...

Amazon AWS revenue was 2.4B in Q4 and 2B in Q3. GCE would be obvious next (and the easiest as a lot of components is already in-place) big money printing thing for Google if done right. Yet it seems that they struggle even there.

One of the main issue i see here is pretty typical for Google in my view, ie. that Google isn't really trying to serve customers - i mean in search Google is monopolist and thus advertisers would pay attention to and follow every whim of Google. In cloud computing customers don't have to appreciate the honor of being a GCE customer, instead they can just go to AWS (where automated tools as well as real customer service are really geared for customer).

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

#173

Post by hyperpallium »

maxxxxx wrote: post #113
CydeWeys wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alphabet is the second largest publicly traded company in the world ... if that's not business success, what is? I think in these kinds of conversations we sometimes lose a little perspective.

Sorry, my post was not complete. No doubt they are doing great with their ad business. But they seem to struggle with making money from any of the other things they do. And to justify their valuation at some point they have make massive amounts of profit. Much more than they do now. So it seems to me that some of the smartest guys doing the coolest tech in the world is not sufficient to making money.

> struggle with making money from any of the other things they do

They're not so much struggling to make money, but struggling to make comparable money to one of the most phenomenally successful businesses ever seen.

It's like saying Apple TV is a hobby because it's only a billion dollar business.

Rounding errors at Google/Apple are greater than our wildest dreams.

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

#174

Post by m_eiman »

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…

Today's cars are unused most of the time

But when they're used, most of them are used at the same time - rush hour traffic. If everyone wants to go to work in a car at the same time, you'll still need about as many cars.

What's needed is a diversification of working times: if half of the workforce started work an hour later, it would have a huge impact on traffic density and would also make things like shared self-driving cars more realistic.

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

#175

Post by sspiff »

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…

Figure 1 and 3 are duplicates.

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

#176

Post by bru »

xyzzyz wrote: post #75
mediocrejoker wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, they are: http://www.wordstream.com/articles/most-expensive-keywords

Interesting, even though it's now 5 years old. I'd be interested in the evolution. Also, a pie chart? Really? I can't fathom who thought it'd be a good idea…

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

#177

Post by matt4077 »

n13 wrote: post #142
matwood wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GCE is much simpler to use than EC2. Google came to the party late and they have seemed to take some time to not replicate AWSs annoyances.

Would you please care to share learning resources about GCE other than the official docs?

I've moved our infrastructure over to GCE and basically just clicked around in the interface until I had what I wanted. It's really quite easy (although I'm only using compute engine and bigtable right now).

I got 300$ in credits on every google account when I first vistited which allowed me to play around with their big data stuff and some public datasets, which was nice.

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

#178

Post by coldtea »

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…

>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

And yet frequently the press glorifies Google's "innovation" and is bullish on Apple, that has like 4-5 different sources of income (the PCs, the phone, the tablet, the watch, the tv, the cloud services, the app store, the music store) -- with more than one of them earning more profits than the whole of Alphabet put together.

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

#179

Post by coldtea »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #118
maxxxxx wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, my post was not complete. No doubt they are doing great with their ad business. But they seem to struggle with making money from any of the other things they do. And to justify their valuation at some point they have make massive amounts of profit. Much more than they do now. So it seems to me that some of the smartest guys doing the coolest tech in the world is not sufficient to making money.

How long did it take for Google to really start printing money? 5? Maybe 10 years? Think of those projects now not wildly profitable as the seeds of new, profitable businesses down the road. Short term thinking, that's the problem with the equities market.

>How long did it take for Google to really start printing money? 5? Maybe 10 years? Think of those projects now not wildly profitable as the seeds of new, profitable businesses down the road.

What projects? The self driving car? The traditional car companies (that also work on that), Tesla, the Chinese, and even Apple who's verified to be working on such a project can possibly all kill them on that market.

What else of importance is there? Their AWS competitor?

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

#180

Post by coldtea »

tamana wrote: post #150
rsync wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only ... If only there were cloud products and services that were dead simple and just did one little useful thing just the way you wanted it. If only ...

What about when folks want lots of useful things?

Then they are outliers, and market themselves out of the 80/20 customer segment.
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