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points by jonas21 13 hours ago | 0 comments

I get what they're trying to say, but it still seems a bit unconventional to have a line chart where the y-axis is a share percentage.

Here's a graph with revenue in dollars by segment:

https://www.pasteboard.co/DwvXdQj2LXpk.png

[–] hinkley 13 hours ago

This graph invites some pertinent questions. For instance, it suggests that their search revenue growth went linear sometime in 2020 and might be going asymptotic as of the last year. So I want to know what happens there over the next several quarters. Is the current quarter anomalous, or do deferred payments always make it look like that?

Second, is the geometric growth of Cloud cannibalizing their search teams, leading to less effort being put into sales. And so it’s not so much that demand is tapering off as that supply is being constrained as an opportunity cost. That $1m in salary nets more profit from Cloud than from Search.

[–] FloorEgg 11 hours ago

As a power user of Google search for decades, I find myself using it less and less (maybe now 5% of my historical peak usage). There are several reasons, but the main one is because they have gradually traded search quality for ad revenue with the direct consequence being wasting my time.

If I type in the name of a company so that I can navigate to their website, and I have to scroll past my whole viewport of other companies bidding to be placed above where I'm trying to go, I learn it's faster for me to just type the website address into the bar instead of going via Google.

They designed a UX that made my life easier and caused me to form a habit, and then broke that UX for money causing me to form a new habit.

It's just one example of dozens, but the consequence is that I see 95% fewer Google ads than I used to. My guess I am on the leading edge (along with many others on this forum) of a wave of change of user behavior that spells pessimism for Google search revenue.

[–] autoexec 1 hour ago

> I learn it's faster for me to just type the website address into the bar instead of going via Google.

It pretty much always was, assuming you type reasonably well anyway. Especially once browsers just started guessing at what you want by automatically adding "https://" and ".com" to whatever you type into an address bar and trying that before redirecting you to a search engine.

[–] hinkley 10 hours ago

It is unfortunate and only sometimes sustainable to alienate a third of your user base to extract 2x as much money from the rest for a net 30% increase in short term revenue. It’s not repeatable usually.

[–] gniv 12 hours ago

> Is the current quarter anomalous,

Yes, to an extent. There were three unfavorable circumstances other than AI eating into search: FX (major), the World Cup timing, end of de minimis exemption in EU.

[–] demibabs 8 hours ago

Can you explain how these affected Google Search? My mind isn’t connecting the dots.

[–] shermantanktop 12 hours ago

That’s almost always a delayed effect. Move software people around and the revenue effects aren’t instant. In a heavily R&D-oriented area it might be 2y or more.

[–] hinkley 10 hours ago

However customers often take a while to adapt to changing conditions.

If for instance you enshittify a tool brand, first the supply chain needs to drain of old inventory and then customers need to be confronted with the new product before they react, and that may take several interactions.

Ok this case that doesn’t describe people using search but does describe a monthly or quarterly ad spend. Once the feature factory shuts down it takes a bit to notice the new trend.

[–] haute_cuisine 13 hours ago

Thanks for sharing, search revenue is growing strong. It's mind blowing that they earn ~180m per day from people searching internet.

[–] cbowal 13 hours ago

These figures are just for the latest quarter, so Google's actually making ~$700m per day from search!

[–] IshKebab 13 hours ago

Well not that surprising given that the results are now 80% ads.

The real trick is that they're pretty much the only relevant ads on the entire internet. That and they pretty much force companies into paying so that people that search specifically for that company actually see that company as the first result.

[–] andrewguy9 13 hours ago

Thank you for showing the actually useful chart.

[–] dogscatstrees 12 hours ago

Here's a dual-axis graph, revenue $ left axis, % share of revenue right axis.

https://www.pasteboard.co/yCGoS8kxEy7Y.png

Google Cloud clearly on positive acceleration for revenue share.

[–] usefulcat 12 hours ago

Notice how for both "search" and "everything else" there's a peak at almost every year boundary. Trying to juice the EOY numbers, I guess?

[–] svat 12 hours ago

Both "search" and "everything else" are primarily advertising revenue[1], and advertising spend is always heavier in Q4 because of (Black Friday and) Christmas.

[1]: As the page says,

- "Search" means "ads on Google Search and on other Google properties such as Gmail, Maps and Google Play"

- "Everything else" means "YouTube ads, subscriptions and devices, Google Network and Other Bets".

[–] kenhwang 11 hours ago

Matches my experience in adtech, Q4 was always at least half of our yearly revenue. Q1 usually came in at less than 1/4 of Q4.

[–] bradknowles 5 hours ago

The story goes that Black Friday was named that because it was the break-over point between where most companies were in the red versus when they turned the corner and were now in the black.

At Whole Foods eStore, during the time I worked there, virtually all of their profit came from Thanksgiving. Not before, not after. Just that one week. Christmas was also something of a bump, but the rest of the year operated at a loss.

[–] Scoundreller 10 hours ago

should have grown your "how do I pay these credit card bills?" vertical

[–] JacobAsmuth 12 hours ago

Conspiracy theorist discovers seasonality, 2026. Colorized.

[–] literalAardvark 13 hours ago

Edit: I misread the graph. It's the actual number.

(Love the cheeky exponential right past the end of data at the end of a straight line.

Forecasting 501: forecasts say the boss is smart)

[–] cochne 13 hours ago

Isn’t it the actual number?

[–] literalAardvark 13 hours ago

Thanks, and also, wow.

[–] alberth 12 hours ago

Is google cloud revenue curve really that smooth?

[–] AlienRobot 10 hours ago

Everyone already uses Google, so every quarter the revenue goes up it's definitely not because of a higher market share...

Why does it even need to keep going up anyway? Is 60 billion not enough?

[–] 121789 10 hours ago

Depends if you invest and want your investment to grow

[–] jsnell 10 hours ago

The growth doesn't need to be from Search. Even with the current level of search growth, Google's total revenue is up 25% year on year, operating income is up 30% year on year.

[–] AlienRobot 8 hours ago

You are wrong. Search is already profitable. It doesn't need to become more profitable. The profits can simply be used to improve the profitability of other offerings like Google Cloud.

[–] bradknowles 5 hours ago

That’s not the way Wallstreet thinks. They insist on continuing growth, year over year. Accelerating growth, even.

If you don’t show growth every year, then your stock tanks because you can’t show them the profit that they would make through buying your stock today and then selling it next year.

At least, that’s the way they normally think.

[–] singingtoday 12 hours ago

Thank you for that. Super interesting.

I'm surprised GCP rev is growing so fast. Anecdotally, most devs I know still prefer AWS.

[–] solatic 12 hours ago

GCP got really, really good in the last few years. The cross-account story is now better on GCP than on AWS. BigQuery, Spanner, Pub/Sub, GKE are all best-in-class. AWS has its advantages too: CloudFront, Lambda, S3, DynamoDB, and IPv6 support are all best-in-class. It really just depends on what your product's actual architectural needs are, and whether you have access to nosebleed budget to pay for it all (these services are all staggeringly expensive).

[–] cavisne 12 hours ago

Cloud revenue is really concentrated now, AWS is the only mass market platform.

Everything else is “call for pricing” for all but the simplest use cases.