back to article Sky still blue, above the ocean: Google still raking it in

Gigantic automated advertising machine Google has logged yet another quarter of sound results, showing that if you can get punters in the door to buy magic digital beans without ever having a paid staff member interact with them, you'll do well indeed. The Mountain View Chocolate Factory reported revenue of $17.73bn for the …

  1. Shannon Jacobs
    Holmes

    For exceedingly small values of "good".

    Do you have anything more valuable than your time? If you're confused about the question, imagine you only have two minutes to live, and how much of that time do you want to waste in your confused state.

    Now consider how much of your time the google would like to fill with ads. The answer may surprise you: ALL of it. Of course that isn't possible, but we have to let the google dream, don't we?

    There was a time some years ago when I believed the motto "Don't be evil." Later on I thought the motto could be fixed with a bit of tinkering, something along the lines of fixing their other motto to be something like "Making all of the world's information available while helping you protect your privacy." These days, I think the google has a new motto:

    "All your attention are belong to the google!"

    (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base_are_belong_to_us)

    At first I didn't blame the google so much as the rules of the American business game. Then I learned that the google had become the largest tech lobbyist bribing the pols. Very few companies that I actually want to deal with these days. Just picking the least bad option--like the pols (on those rare occasions when the pols didn't pick their voters first).

    1. Mark 85

      Re: For exceedingly small values of "good".

      Well... the analysts are grumbling about their growth slowing. The only way to speed up the growth in a relatively saturated market is to somehow get people to spend more time looking at ads. So you're right, they do want all our time.

      But until they figure out how to convince our bosses that we should be looking at their ads or that we should be looking at ads instead of having a life, the analysts and Google can blow it out their butts.

  2. PleebSmash
    Joke

    just a hobby

    The "Other" segment itself doesn't look particularly lively, though. Its revenue of $1.70bn was up a respectable 6.8 per cent from the same period a year ago but down 2.6 per cent from Q1. It was the second sequential quarter in a row in which its revenue declined. As always, though, wondering how Google's technology business is performing is just a hobby

    Compare that hobby with AMD's $942M.

  3. Salts

    I do remember ...

    In the late 90's all the journalist saying how is Google going to make money "Through advertising" was derided as not really worth that much, though these same people forgot that at that time news print was worthless and it was advertising that was paying the bills.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Make hay while the sun shines

    "Turns out selling advertising is a pretty good way to make a living"

    Maybe not for long. The popularity of adblocking is on a very rapid rise, especially in the US, and worse for advertisers, especially among younger people. One study from 2014 suggested 41% of 18-29 year olds polled said they use adblock, and in Firefox adblock downloads far exceed the nearest rival add-on. Blocking at the router is increasing and I'd be surprised if someone doesn't start selling preconfigured adblocking routers and VPN services before long, assuming they haven't already.

    The publishing industry is also beginning to get nervous about adblocking, and the concerns of users about privacy, tracking, malware and the behaviour of ad networks that is driving it. Average users are now much more aware of the connection between ads and tracking, and partly helped along by Snowdens leaks, are beginning to push back hard, which is eventually going to hamstring ad targeting and data collection, whether its done by legal or technical means.

    Advertising sadly isn't going to disappear, but the idea of it and the user data harvesting that rides on its coat tails as a bottomless well of money that can't be emptied is going to evaporate quite rapidly, I think. The wind is not blowing Google's way in more than one respect.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Make hay while the sun shines

      It is not only you youngsters that are blocking ADs.

      Us old timers do it as well.

      After all there are only so many adverts for Stair Lifts, Funeral Plans, Over 50/60's Insurance and other age related crap that a sane being can take.

      I might be of pensionable age but I ain't ready to pop my clogs yet.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Make hay while the sun shines

        It's the funeral plans that are getting me :-( And only 53 - I wonder what I looked at to elicit so much attention - and that's the stuff that gets through the spam filters!

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Make hay while the sun shines

        "It is not only you youngsters that are blocking Ads"

        The point was that the younger generation are the ones that the advertisers keep salivating over. According to the ad pimp orthodoxy they are easier to impress, have more disposable income and presumably, apart from fleecing them, the plan is to get them inured to the sheer drivel the industry puts out, so that by the time they're our age the thought of using an adblocker would be the furthest thing from their minds.

  5. Terry 6 Silver badge

    Bean counters

    Beyond Google's performance I found this phrase telling;

    Recently some analysts have grumbled that Google isn't growing its business as rapidly as it once did and they'd like to see it cut its expenses.

    Which, though El Reg's summary, does seem to be an indication of something important.

    The extent to which bean counters seem to believe that business' costs should always be moving as close to zero as possible, rather than looking for acceptable (or good) cost/earnings ratios.

    It's the old story of the farmer who decided to train his donkey to eat less.

    So every day he reduced the food he gave it.

    And just as he thought he'd succeeded the ungrateful beast went and died.

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