Alphabet

The results announced Tuesday by Alphabet Inc. marked the third consecutive quarter of escalating revenue growth for the Mountain View, Calif., company, with most of the sales coming through Google’s dominance of search and online advertising. The rebound followed an unprecedented drop in Google’s ad revenue coming out of the pandemic following nearly 20 years of uninterrupted growth.

A rebound in digital advertising led to an uptick in revenue and profit for Alphabet, Google’s parent company, but investors were underwhelmed by its cloud computing business, which badly trails those of rivals Microsoft and Amazon. Sales were up 11% from a year ago while profit jumped 42% to $19.7 billion.

The results for the April-June period released Tuesday by Google’s corporate parent, Alphabet Inc., reversed a financial downswing that had raised fears Google was losing its financial steam at the same time advances in artificial intelligence threatened to undercut the dominant search engine that powers its digital ad empire.

An unprecedented downturn in Google’s digital ad revenue – the company’s main moneymaker for more than 20 years – came into sharper focus Tuesday with the release of the January-Marcy results for its corporate parent, Alphabet Inc.

While overall revenue grew at Google’s parent, advertising revenue fell by nearly 4% and revenue at YouTube declined 8% year-over-year. That appeared to spook investors, who sent the company’s stock lower in after-hours trading. The company said it earned $13.62 billion, or $1.05 per share, in the October-December quarter. That’s down 34% from $20.64 billion, or $1.53 per share, in the same period a year earlier.

Big Tech companies took a heavy beating last week, to the tune of more than $255 billion in lost market capitalization that’s helped make a bad year even worse for the once-beloved sector. The five tech giants that posted results have now lost a combined $3 trillion in market cap on the year, according to Dow Jones Market Data, showing that Big Tech isn’t immune to the macroeconomic storm sweeping up the broader stock market.

Alphabet Inc., which owns an array of smaller technology companies in addition to Google, on Tuesday posted revenue of $69.1 billion for the July-September quarter, a 6% increase from the same time last year. It marked the first time Alphabet’s year-over-year quarterly revenue has risen by less than 10% since the April-June period of 2020. At that time, the advertisers that generate most of its revenue pulled in their reins because of the economic uncertainty during the pandemic’s early months.

The U.S. Justice Department is preparing to sue Google as soon as next month, according to people familiar with the matter, capping years of work to build a case that the Alphabet Inc. unit illegally dominates the digital advertising market. Lawyers with the DOJ’s antitrust division are questioning publishers in another round of interviews to refresh facts and glean additional details for the complaint, said three people familiar with the conversations.

Perhaps disabusing the video business of the notion that sustained double-digit growth is merely a matter of transitioning models from subscriber to advertising focus, YouTube just reported its slowest quarterly revenue growth in more than two years. Alphabet said during its second quarter earnings report Tuesday that YouTube generated $7.34 billion from April-June, up 4.8% year over year. The expansion missed equity investor forecasts of around $7.49 billion.

Over-the-top streaming offering YouTube TV has reached a milestone of 5 million subscribers and trial customers, making it one of the most popular nontraditional live TV services in the U.S. Owned by Alphabet, five-year-old YouTube TV has differentiated itself from the competition with unique features such as a cloud-based DVR, real-time statistics for live sports, and more. Now that an increasing number of people are cutting the cord and moving to internet-based television, here’s why this might this be the right moment for Alphabet to break out YouTube TV as a stand-alone operation.

Alphabet Inc.’s Google has offered concessions in an attempt to head off a possible U.S. antitrust lawsuit aimed at its massive ad-tech business, according to people familiar with the matter, a sign that legal and regulatory pressures on the tech giant are coming to a head.

Free Press, Common Cause and a number of other progressive groups and civil rights advocates have called on the biggest social media companies to combat disinformation in the run-up to the midterm elections, the first national election since the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, saying if they don’t, they are “the dominant threat” to the democratic process. That came in the form of letters to the CEOs of Meta, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, and Alphabet from more than 100 groups.

When is a 14% increase in quarterly ad spending a bad thing? When it’s for YouTube. While it was a healthy double-digit increase, it was a “deceleration” from 24% growth YouTube had in the fourth quarter of 2021, and it was the main reason Wall Street analysts attributed to a sell-off in parent Alphabet’s shares following the release of its first quarter results.

As usual, Google’s ad business accounted for the bulk of Alphabet’s profits. The Mountain View, Calif., company earned $20.6 billion, or $30.69 per share, well above the average estimated of $27.66 per share among analysts surveyed by FactSet Research. Revenue rose 32% from the previous year to $75.3 billion, eclipsing analysts’ predictions for revenue of $72.3 billion.

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol issued subpoenas on Thursday to four major social media companies — Alphabet, Meta, Reddit and Twitter — criticizing them for allowing extremism to spread on their platforms and saying they have failed to cooperate adequately with the inquiry.

Mountain View, California-based Alphabet Inc. said Tuesday that it earned $18.94 billion, or $27.99 per share, in the July-September period. Revenue rose 41% to $65.12 billion. The advertising business, the core of the company, rose 43% to $53.13 billion. YouTube’s ads jumped 43%, to $7.21 billion, and the cloud-computing business climbed 45% to $4.99 billion.

The robust first quarter advertising growth announced Tuesday provides the latest sign that advertisers are expecting the economy to roar back to life as more people get vaccinated against COVID-19 and burst out of their pandemic cocoons.

The chief executives of Twitter, Alphabet and Facebook (l-r: Jack Dorsey, Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg) will appear before a House panel, where they will face questions about social media’s role in fomenting discord and their decisions to suspend or ban former President Trump.

Google/YouTube parent Alphabet saw revenue jump last quarter driven by YouTube and search. Total sales surged to $56.9 billion for the last three months of 2020 from $46 billion the year before, smashing expectations. YouTube ad revenue jumped to $6.9 billion from $4.7 billion the year before and $5 billion last quarter. Google search and other advertising revenue was $31.9 billion, from $27.2 billion the year before.

Facebook and Google agreed to “cooperate and assist one another” if they ever faced an investigation into their pact to work together in online advertising, according to an unredacted version of a lawsuit filed by 10 states against Google last week.

During its third quarter earnings call, Google and YouTube parent company Alphabet reported that YouTube TV subscribers had passed 3 million. That’s up from 2 million reported in February — despite a monthly price hike from $50 to $65 at the end of the third quarter, following its deal to carry legacy Viacom cable networks. The new number puts YouTube TV in second place among virtual vMVPDs, behind Hulu, with 3.4 million subscribers as of 2Q.

While all five — Amazon, Google parent Alphabet, Facebook, Apple and Twitter — exceeded analyst expectations, gloomy forecasts and other uncertainties led to share-price declines for all but Alphabet in after-market trading.

Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Alphabet rallied on Thursday ahead of earnings reports from the group of technology heavyweights that has helped keep Wall Street in positive territory this year, despite the coronavirus pandemic.

Alphabet Inc. on Friday settled a shareholder lawsuit that accused the Google parent of covering up lavish exit packages to executives found responsible for sexual misconduct, saying it would overhaul workplace policies and increase oversight of its diversity efforts.

The staggering economic fallout caused by the coronavirus pandemic was reflected in reports released Thursday from Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Google’s corporate parent, Alphabet.

YouTube brought in $4.04 billion during the first quarter, marking an increase of 33% from the 1Q 2019, according to parent company Alphabet, which reported its first quarter earnings on Tuesday afternoon. Overall, YouTube accounted for nearly 10% of Alphabet’s $41.16 billion in 1Q sales. (Alphabet is also the parent company of Google.) YouTube’s $4.04 billion in 1Q sales falls a bit short of where it was at during the last quarter of 2019, when it reported $4.72 billion in revenue.

The Federal Trade Commission has launched a lookback at some of the smaller past acquisitions by some of the largest tech companies. The FTC said Tuesday it has issued “special orders” to Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft, which require them to provide info on all acquisitions over the past decade (Jan. 1, 2010 through Dec. 31, 2019).

Google’s parent company becomes the fourth tech company — after Apple, Amazon and Microsoft — to reach the market milestone.

Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page (above, l-r, in 2008) are stepping down from their roles within the parent company, Alphabet. Page, who had been serving as CEO of Alphabet, and Brin, who had been president of Alphabet, will remain on the board of the company.

On Monday, Google parent Alphabet met growth expectations for its key moneymaking businesses — notably its advertising business, which reported revenues that increased 17% to $33.9 billion during the quarter. But Alphabet’s capital expenditures grew at the same time, rising to $6.7 billion in the period as Google continued to expand its headquarters and build data centers for its cloud computing business.

Not likely. Analysts believe the Alphabet unit generates between $16 billion and $25 billion a year, while local TV broadcasting tops $30 billion. But no one knows for sure because Alphabet has decided not to break out YouTube’s financials in its earning reports.

Not likely. Analysts believe that the Alphabet unit generates between $16 billion and $25 billion a year, while local TV broadcasting annual revenues tops $30 billion. But no one outside […]

The Alphabet-owned streaming behemoth has its revenue and profit statistics swept up into the larger collection of its parent company’s business units. Investors are expressing growing frustration with the veil covering YouTube, seeing it as a reason for alarm after Alphabet posted its slowest growth rates this quarter since 2015.

Alphabet’s first-quarter revenue missed analysts’ estimates, sparking concern that advertisers are shifting some spending from Alphabet’s Google subsidiary to digital rivals. Revenue from Google advertising rose 15% from a year earlier. That was down from 24% year-over-year growth in the first quarter of 2018.

Alphabet Inc’s Wing Aviation unit on Tuesday got the OK to start delivering goods by drone in Virginia later this year, making the sister unit of search engine Google the first company to get U.S. air carrier certification, the Federal Aviation Administration said.