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Alphabet Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2021 Results

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Re: Alphabet Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2021 Results

#121

Post by summerlight »

joanfihu wrote: post #59

I’m wondering if growth is just synthetic at this point. They can just add more ads regardless of user growth. There has been a noticeable increase in ads across all their products.

This is one of significant misconception for digital marketing. More ads doesn't necessarily mean more revenue since it's bound by total advertising budget. Let's assume an optimal ads market and you put more ads there without further optimization or budget, then there will be less auction pressure per ads (thus less CPM) and roughly similar revenue. For something like 40% YoY growth at Google's scale, you need to convince big advertisers to allocate more budgets.

Re: Alphabet Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2021 Results

#122

Post by Rebelgecko »

paulpauper wrote: post #110
timbeccue wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Margin or options would give you leveraged exposure.

not as good. margin has high borrow fees and path dependency. options are better but still has a lot of fees, slippage, and needs to be adjusted to target appropriate delta. a 3x fund would make it so much easier and cheaper.

At least with IB you're looking at margin rates in the 1-2% neighborhood (which is potentially more like 0.6-1% after you take the tax deduction). Depending on your tax bracket, that's actually cheaper than the expense ratios of most (all?) leveraged funds, and let's you avoid the wonkiness that comes with holding leveraged ETFs over time

Re: Alphabet Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2021 Results

#123

Post by tonyedgecombe »

skybrian wrote: post #107
paulpauper wrote: post #101

This is the closest thing to investing in Renaissance Technologies. It's too bad there is not a way to get 2-3x leverage version of google. The CAGR since its IPO in 2004 is the same as Renaissance too. Rather than executing millions of trades, the profit is from millions of clicks. Like renaissance , massive statistical analysis is involved, such as tracking click patterns and optimizing the ads. There is no limit t…

It seems like there should be a limit to the ad market, though? Also, isn't increasing ad blindness a thing? (Even without ad blockers.)

I remember reading a paper from LSE that showed that advertising tended to crowd out investment in R&D and that in the long term increased advertising has a detrimental effect on the whole economy.

Re: Alphabet Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2021 Results

#124

Post by tonyedgecombe »

Jensson wrote: post #115
sidcool wrote: post #113

It's mind boggling to me that Google is still losing money on GCP. It's been years. And AWS and Azure are minting money. Any reason why?

Amazon and Microsoft uses AWS and Azure themselves. Google doesn't use GCP, the service you buy is not the service Google engineers use internally. This both means that GCP cannot bill the rest of Google to inflate their own numbers and that GCP likely are less battle tested since they don't have a huge internal customer.

Also there seems to be a widespread perception among developers that Google will drop services on a whim. Whether it's true or not that has to have an impact on people signing up to their services.

Re: Alphabet Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2021 Results

#125

Post by wonnage »

panarky wrote: post #80
option wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They earned their monopoly position.

Real monopolies like Comcast and Waste Management lock up markets so consumers don't have a choice. Google has to re-earn their position every day since competitors are only a click away.

*a google search away

Re: Alphabet Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2021 Results

#126

Post by ksec »

carlsborg wrote: post #24

Summary: Full year 2021 revenue $257B, 41% year on year growth. Net income $76B, up from $40B yoy. Quarterly: Q4 of 2021 they made $75B revenue, most of it came from Google Search, $43B up from $31.9B in Q4 2020. Youtube $8.6B of ads, Google Network $9.3B from ads. Google cloud did $5B revenue for the quarter, up from $3.8B in Q4 2020. It lost $890m this quarter compared to $1.2B Q4 2020. "Other Services" did $8.1B r…

Up ~10% after market. Should be around 2T Market Cap now. Apple is 2.8T while M$ is 2.3T.

I think I am very good at numbers, comparatively speaking. But these number is till mind boggling. It is hard to comprehend how and why they could continue to grow. With $140B cash while Android is still half polished. GCP not competing. And killing half a dozen random products and services from time to time.

Re: Alphabet Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2021 Results

#127

Post by cobertos »

riku_iki wrote: post #91
cobertos wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

uBlock works with Firefox's mobile browser

Do you personally use Firefox's mobile browser for searching in Google? Does it work well with voice commands?

For searching in Google? I use Google with the Firefox mobile browser, yes. I also don't use voice commands on any platform, just transcription GBoard and I've had no issues.

Re: Alphabet Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2021 Results

#128

Post by Avalaxy »

jeffbee wrote: post #17
endisneigh wrote: post #3

Man, Google’s poor search results sure do pay well /s. I wonder if Google will make any big acquisitions this year

Not sure if sarcasm or not. These results demonstrate that the HN zeitgeist about the utility of Google is not related to its actual utility to the public at large.

This is very noticeable. I remember everyone here saying Atlassian was a sinking ship when they switched to cloud-only. Ever since, its stock has almost doubled. I can probably think of a pretty big list of other things where HN hivemind completely misaligns with how 90% of the normal population thinks.

Re: Alphabet Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2021 Results

#129

Post by detaro »

jeffbee wrote: post #17
endisneigh wrote: post #3

Man, Google’s poor search results sure do pay well /s. I wonder if Google will make any big acquisitions this year

Not sure if sarcasm or not. These results demonstrate that the HN zeitgeist about the utility of Google is not related to its actual utility to the public at large.

Doesn't really follow. a) Google is a lot more than search and b) it's not like people noticing "crap, search results are getting worse" suddenly stop using it entirely, given there is no clearly superior competitor. Similarly with many other products.

Re: Alphabet Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2021 Results

#130

Post by lotsofpulp »

dekhn wrote: post #77
mupuff1234 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's gives a better understanding of what's the bottom line after expenses. You could have a ton of revenue, Walmart for example, but if you have razor thin margins that revenue won't necessarily translate into giant piles of money in the bank, which in the end is what most businesses are after.

I think Amazon was different from Apple and Google in that on the way up, they intentionally managed their cash flows to sort of keep their margins small (always investing extra cash into growth). Walmart is that, but to an extreme. They could sort of just make money on the interest of their cash flow (I'm not an economist or accountant, so that is probably not true)

If Walmart could be making more money on interest from their cash flow, they would be already be making more money. It is not a novel or difficult idea.

The profit margins of the business of retail is not in the MAMAA league. Being a retail middleman is simply not as profitable as what the tech companies can do because they can scale at extremely low marginal costs, and barrier to entry is very high.

Amazon’s value lies in AWS and prime video/music/logistics/platform, not the part where you buy something shipped and sold by Amazon.com. Hence why Amazon removed the button to filter searches to only items shipped and sold by amazon, and why Walmart introduced their own version of a platform where they can make money as a platform, rather than a retailer.

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