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Alphabet Announces Second Quarter 2021 Results (opens in new tab)

(abc.xyz)

56 pointshigh_derivative4y ago64 comments

64 comments

38 comments · 5 top-level

Crash0v3rid34y ago· 13 in thread

Insane growth with YouTube ads revenue. I don't think any other streaming video service comes close.

mcast4y ago

I only have anecdotal evidence for this, but before I started using YouTube Premium, I noticed I always got 1-3 minute ads before playing videos. But when I had videos playing in the background without using the TV remote/mouse (e.g. falling asleep on the iPad), I would see 30-60 minute ads. It seems YT is maximizing ad revenue by showing full length ads to empty viewers.

baby4y ago

They have an insane number of ads on youtube now. I finally caved and bought a subscription… they’re like 2 times the price of a netflix sub

I did too. Youtube is not cheap for ad free. But I found I really like youtube music which comes with it.

judge20204y ago

Technically YT Premium includes "4K" which matches the price point of Netflix's 4k option. YT seems to have to spread their share around to more people as well, as a common observation for content creators is that Premium views offer much higher revenues than ad-supported views.

ls6124y ago

Thankfully my desktop adblocker continues to work on youtube so I haven’t had to deal with this yet

I might be mistaken but didn't Tiktok report $36B revenue for last year and they are way more young compared to YouTube.

YT has much more variety of content than Tiktok like music videos, educational content etc. Bytedance's numbers seem mind boggling when you take into account this. An amusing thing is that Bytedance competes with YouTube in US but YouTube wasn't allowed to in Bytedance's home country.

minsc__and__boo4y ago

That's the revenue for ByteDance, which is more than just Tiktok (though it's probably it's most popular product)

jeffchien4y ago

Reading Chinese news [0] on this:

> 据彭博社消息，字节跳动2020年广告收入1831亿元。抖音为字节跳动贡献近60%的广告总收入...另外，海外短视频平台Tik Tok目前仅占字节跳动广告收入的一小部分。

Translation mine: According to Bloomberg, ByteDance's 2020 ad revenue was 183.1B RMB [US$28B, seems to be from 1], with Douyin making up 60% of that [corroborated by 2]... Overseas short video platform TikTok also makes up a small portion of that.

For growth [2]:

> 而据传，2019年字节跳动全年营收约1400亿元，其中广告收入约1200亿元

Translation mine: ByteDance's 2019 revenue was 140B RMB, of which 120B RMB was ad revenue.

So Douyin makes 60% * US$28B/year ~= US$17B/year for 2020 and 183/120 ~= 53% growth (2019 to 2020).

[0] https://finance.sina.com.cn/tech/2021-06-18/doc-ikqciyzk0383...

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-16/bytedance...

[2] https://www.36kr.com/p/965252059471619

gpt54y ago

Surely Tiktok is growing much faster.

fauigerzigerk4y ago

It's a big jump but the comparison is with Q2 2020, which was the most unusual quarter in the history of mankind I think, at least outside of wartime. I believe it was their first ever negative quarter yoy.

Insane and more invasive. Some ads makes me uncomfortable. I am eating my dinner and there is an ad about guy excited because after this specifically prepared dog food, his dog poops are now "healthy".

But its not as bad as the ad for some soap where interracial couple stands under shower in what you can obviously imagine being naked, and she tells him "you smell nasty" and give him the new improved soap. Then the guy looks in the camera and says: "do whatever it takes to pleasure your lady". How the heck is Youtube approving these ads??

Side note, I am not surprised their ad revenue blew up. I never seen so much scam ads on Youtube ever before: I am daily swamp with Kevin David "make yourself billionaire by selling crap on Amazon" videos, and "This simple plug device will allow you to save 80% on your gas price". Total and complete, obvious scams. I tell you - the FTC sleeps well, while WWW became literally WILD WILD WEB [of scams]

spywaregorilla4y ago

All of the ads I get feature fake customers showing their undying appreciation to their insurance companies

wow nice downvoting speed - someone didn't even give it a chance and read it. I literally hit "edit" some 15 seconds after commenting and its already negative karma. beautiful.

swampthinker4y ago· 10 in thread

GCP revenue rises from $3Bn to $4.6Bn, but how does that track against AWS and MSFT?

nostrademons4y ago

MSFT reported 51% revenue growth for Azure, so it's pretty constant:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2021-Q4...

doikor4y ago

Not sure what the actual number is but they did report 50% growth for last quarter

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-21-Q3/p...

> Server products and cloud services revenue increased 26% (up 23% in constant currency) driven by Azure revenue growth of 50% (up 46% in constant currency)

edit: my link was for the quarter before but the actual previous quarter (that ended today) still reports 51% growth

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2021-Q4...

> Server products and cloud services revenue increased 34% (up 29% in constant currency) driven by Azure revenue growth of 51% (up 45% in constant currency)

Rather than revenue increase, the more interesting thing seems to be the significant fall in loss. Since they are close to profitability, it might allow them to be more aggressive on pricing.

reilly30004y ago

Note: that also include all Google Workspace related income.

mupuff12344y ago

Note #2: Microsoft also reports office 365 as part of its cloud revenue.

simonbarker874y ago

From a UX perspective I find GCP much better than Azure but I fear that Alphabet will get bored of GCP given how far behind AWS and Azure they are.

dodobirdlord4y ago

Google Cloud's 2021 revenue is larger than YouTube's 2020 revenue. Nobody gets bored of $18B ARR that's growing at 50%/year.

I've been seeing rehashes of this comment for ~2 years at this point, and it just gets more unreasonable with each quarter. When will this tired meme die?

minsc__and__boo4y ago

If anything, Alphabet will likely spin GCP off of Google and make it its own dedicated company under the Alphabet umbrella.

Alphabet needs multiple revenue streams and Cloud is positioned to be a major one.

suresk4y ago

Understandable to be wary of anything Google offers given their track record, but GCP is way too big and strategic for them to get bored of it.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/07/google-cloud-offers-...

frakt0x904y ago· 8 in thread

"we completed an assessment of the useful lives of our servers and network equipment and adjusted the estimated useful life of our servers from three years to four years and the estimated useful life of certain network equipment from three years to five years. This change in accounting estimate was effective beginning in fiscal year 2021 and the effect was a reduction in depreciation expense of $721 million and $1.6 billion and an increase in net income of $561 million and $1.2 billion, or $0.84 and $1.81 per basic and $0.83 and $1.78 per diluted share, for the three and six months ended June 30, 2021, respectively."

Crazy how those seemingly small changes can result in huge accounting difference.

Vaslo4y ago

This gets removed from EBITDA though, to avoid that accounting magic

tyingq4y ago

Sort of. Depreciation is added back in, but at a lower percentage/year. 25% instead of 33%, since it's 4 years instead of 3 now.

markus_zhang4y ago

That's some accounting magic you have here. Next time they need the stock to go the other direction maybe they will say something else.

sebzim45004y ago

Maybe, but it is entirely plausible that the equipment is lasting longer than they were expecting. No one really knows how long a generation of hardware is going to last until it starts failing.

I think we will see more of this as time goes on. As the innovation of hardware slows, the importance of its longevity grows.

bellyfullofbac4y ago

My guess was their study came about more because of the chip shortage...

ocdtrekkie4y ago

It's a lot of hardware they have. I imagine this assessment took into account rising costs of replacements due to chip shortages, the fact that recent processor generations haven't actually brought meaningful performance or efficiency gains, etc. The cost/benefit of replacing server equipment is not particularly good right now.

dilyevsky4y ago

Meanwhile gcp hands you broadwell cpus (and sometimes haswell)

sneilan14y ago· 2 in thread

Does google release any numbers regarding number of search queries per quarter? I feel like the number of search queries would directly correlate with revenue, if I'm not mistaken.

If not, I find it very interesting that they don't release that number. They mention a rising tide of online activity but no numbers to back that up.

sebzim45004y ago

I don't see why number of search queries would correlate that strongly with revenue. For a start, Alphabet does a lot of things that aren't search. Secondly an improvement in the search algorithm might mean people make fewer searches (since they get the desired results immediately) without having any real impact on revenue.

I feel that search queries would correlate strongly with revenue because google serves ads next to search queries. Less search queries would mean less ads served.

Also 2021 Q2 revenue from google services was 57 billion dollars which was the lions share of revenue according to the shareholder report. So yes, while Google makes money from other things, they mostly make money from search ads.

gigatexal4y ago

Wow. What a quarter! Google cloud’s loss was just shy of 600M that’s down a ton.

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