Google Third Quarter Results: Revenues Of $9.72 Billion

[engine]

Google Third Quarter Results: Revenues Of $9.72 Billion [investor.google.com]

October 13, 2011 - Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) today announced financial results for the quarter ended September 30, 2011.

"We had a great quarter,” said Larry Page, CEO of Google. “Revenue was up 33% year on year and our quarterly revenue was just short of $10 billion. Google+ is now open to everyone and we just passed the 40 million user mark. People are flocking into Google+ at an incredible rate and we are just getting started!"

Q3 Financial Summary

Google reported revenues of $9.72 billion for the quarter ended September 30, 2011, an increase of 33% compared to the third quarter of 2010. Google reports its revenues, consistent with GAAP, on a gross basis without deducting traffic acquisition costs (TAC). In the third quarter of 2011, TAC totaled $2.21 billion, or 24% of advertising revenues.

[venice]

That's just about what it cost to build CityCenter in Las Vegas, US most costly private real estate project to date.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

...we just passed the 40 million user markPeople are flocking into Google+ at an incredible rate and we are just getting started!

Wishful thinking. Facebook has nearly a billion users worldwide which makes Google+ seem paltry at just 40 million, there's still a very long way to go for a company pushing out what has basically already been done.

[huffingtonpost.com...]

total users and growth metrics might not be the best way to evaluate the success of the service. What really matters for the service's long-term success is what these users do after they sign up.

My family members and many close friends already distrust Google and refuse to create what they call "a second account", meaning a second social profile after their facebook accounts, so Google really is trying fight an uphill battle. I'm sure Mr Schmidt will not stop reminding us about +you anytime he speaks for a long time to come.

Is the future of Google tied to the success of +1? I suppose at nearly 10 billion in earnings per quarter that's a very distant worry.

[walkman]

“Revenue was up 33% year on year and our quarterly revenue was just short of $10 billion"

Congratulations, Google must be doing something right. It's not unheard but amazing nonetheless, increase your earnings by 30% when you lose market share! The brightest minds hard at work at GooglePlex, business books will be written about their amazing ability.


Ooops:
[allthingsd.com...]

4:57 pm: Q: Paid click growth is up sharply, but organic growth isn’t. What up? Also, what is “other” revenue which is up sharply?

A: Wojcicki – change in mix sometimes makes an impact. Pichette: “Other” boost comes from ITA acqusition.

Uh, huh Susan.

Paid Clicks – Aggregate paid clicks, which include clicks related to ads served on Google sites and the sites of our AdSense partners, increased approximately 28% over the third quarter of 2010 and increased approximately 13% over the second quarter of 2011.

[searchengineland.com...]

[johnhh]

$10 billion

for a quarter - that would buy a country in some parts of the world. oh no see it now - Googleland established and gets UN seat. I wonder what percentage is US and non-US.

[Leosghost]

IRS are looking at Googles accounting "methods" .. [theregister.co.uk...]

[Web_speed]

Is anyone surprised?

You see all they (google) need to do is to continue lower the quality of their organic SERPs plus run a constant weekly never ending "index updates", constantly shuffling the position for websites almost on daily basis.

This ends up sending websites low-converting, junk organic traffic due to the constant yo-yo changing traffic flux....ultimately pushing millions of businesses from all over the world to use the AdWords program with a gun to their heads. Unfortunatly, for many online businesses it is simply this or die.

It is a lose lose for everyone.....except for Google ofcourse. You see, they will continue to display exponential growth time after time, quarter after quarter, year after year. Because they are operating in a vast market, ("search" is the ultimate gate to business on the Internet), a market they clearly dominate, a market that has unlimited supplies of money...

Internet = Ecommerce world wide = *RIVERS* of money

We are talking millions upon millions of (online/offline) businesses from all around the world, seeking proper online exposure...and they all must give Google a good cut if they want any nowadays...

How is something like that is even allowed to happen in today's world is really beyond me... what a sad sad state of affairs!

[edited by: Web_speed at 12:23 am (utc) on Oct 14, 2011]

[Leosghost]

I have more of a problem with the way mega corps can cut deals in many countries to pay a smaller percentage of their profits in tax than small businesses ..and especially deals that let them move money made in one country away from it to another where there is no or little tax to pay..

That benefits no-one except their CEOs ( and is actually harmful to the economies in which that money is made and the economies in which they should be paying tax ) to and those that they "lobby" to be able to do what would be illegal if the rest of us small businesses did it.

Nor does it create or save "employment"..and "trickle down" is a fantasy smoke screen ..used to cover a lie.

[drall]

Yawn.. MFA in action, take a screen of google serps 7 years ago and compare it to today. Classic MFA...

[mhansen]

U.S. paid clicks, a measure of how frequently consumers click on its ads, increased 28% compared with a year earlier and 13% sequentially.

Using Googles' own words... Search is a sum-zero game, meaning for every click that one person loses, another person gains.

The 28% increase in paid clicks, means that 28% of organic clicks have gone away.

How many of us think ANY of that will ever come back? The days of Google being being about the users have long passed... unless you are a user of their stock in your portfolio.

Not to be interpreted as anti-Google either, I am all for capitalism and free market. I just have a bad taste in my mouth for a company that builds itself on the guise of always-fair, always-objective and always about the user, then pushes them out of the way to maximize their ad footprint.

MH

[walkman]

Most of these posts will probably be deleted for challenging Google's official statements but maybe we should let Matt Cutts know of our concerns so they can self-scrutinize over sushi and Fiji water:

And Google's culture is such that anyone inside or outside of the company can claim that a particular practice isn't in line with "Don't be evil" and kick off a fair amount of self-scrutiny."

[webmasterworld.com...]

[MrSavage]

This news story is the reason I'm spending less time here. Do the math and you can figure that one out.

[minnapple]

Success is as dangerous as failure, and we are often our own worst enemy.
Lao Tzu 500 BC

[tangor]

Google (and other companies following in their wake) are doing nothing new... this was fine tuned on "Madison Avenue" back in the 1930s and fired up full bore in the 1950s. The advertising market is what it is... Google hasn't changed a thing... other than moving the print aspect to the web. Why anyone is surprised is a surprise to me. That said, however, Madison Avenue was hundreds of companies doing this... we're down to what... three? ... where the biz is located. And that, kiddies, is problematical. So I am not surprised that government (any government... they are all always hungry for money) will get involved.

[MrSavage]

Why can't the Google defenders comment on the correlation to many people talking about lost traffic, closing out sites, etc. and the increased revenues of Google? I find the whole, and I mean whole aspect of this to be scary. People are incredibly naive. Google is the growing mass that is almost, and I mean almost out of control. Even more shocking, you ain't seen nothing yet! There is much more profit ahead and yes, it's going to come from their core advertising business.

But I will say, who wants to defend Google here and suggest that Panda has nothing to do with the revenues. Who wants to sit here and say the drying up of organic traffic for a lot of sites has no correlation to their fantastic revenues?

[Web_speed]

Why can't the Google defenders comment on the correlation to many people talking about lost traffic, closing out sites, etc.

Not so much "loss of traffic" in my case, the numbers are more or less the same. What i do see however is crap non converting traffic. My logs are full of viewers from the "wrong countries".....and there are simply no sales. It almost feels like something or someone is grubbing all my good "shoppers traffic" (from the "right" countries) and takes them elsewhere.

I have more then 12 websites on a range of different topics, from pet related to stock market. E-shopping sites (electronics gadgets, software) etc....they all very quiet sales wise lately, i can hear crickets....it's like completely dead yet dialy uniqes are the same.

In addition, i run a few web sites for clients (e-shopping and some local services type sites), same story over there as well...traffic numbers more or less the same but "junk low converting to none" worthless traffic.

Where's all the "good, converting traffic" gone?.... makes you wounder...

Anyone else notice this lately?

[diberry]

The IRS audit could be good news - not for us, but in terms of convincing voters to wake up and realize corps aren't remotely paying their fair share of the taxes, and until they do, we'll never get out of this mess.

[kd454]

Who wants to sit here and say the drying up of organic traffic for a lot of sites has no correlation to their fantastic revenues?

The money has to be going somewhere and I think we have found where the funnel is going. Panda is a smoke screen for something much bigger.

[drall]

This is what I said a few days ago, hundreds of long standing decade plus old sites in my vert have lost 50-90% of google search traffic and no one has gone up.

Folks laughed at me on the boards, told me my niche which is central to computing upped and died over night.

No! What happened is google came in and took hundreds of millions of users a month away and directed them to ads. End of the story.

And I suspect some niches got hit harder then others, especially ones that have millions of advertisers with deep pockets and millions of people searching for it per month (like my niche).

If you didnt get hit by panda, just wait your turn. Now that they have destroyed this vert and that vert they will turn attention to other less savery morsels to fill wall streets endless hunger for increasing profits.

In the end Google is a one trick pony and since organic traffic growth has come to a screeching stop the profits have to come from another venue.

Enter the MFA engine, cloaked under a veil of quality control updates.

If you think you are to big or old or authoritive or you are just amazing with your pr 8 15 year old site with 1 m backlinks. THINK AGAIN!

[Web_speed]

No! What happened is google came in and took hundreds of millions of users a month away and directed them to ads. End of the story.

+1

Wait for the odd smuck to come here and tell you that you are simply being paranoid....like we've been born only yeastarday.

[walkman]

No! What happened is google came in and took hundreds of millions of users a month away and directed them to ads. End of the story.

The money has to be going somewhere and I think we have found where the funnel is going. Panda is a smoke screen for something much bigger.

Google has powerful algorithms and very smart people so they can read the mind. Sometimes an ad might be the best for the user. It's not like Google is biased to send people to ads unless the algo determined it's best for the user. This is what Eric Scmidt said:

But the other thing that we’re doing that’s more strategic is we’re trying to move from answers that are link-based to answers that are algorithmically based, where we can actually compute the right answer. And we now have enough artificial intelligence technology and enough scale and so forth that we can, for example, give you — literally compute the right answer.

“We’re trying to figure out what the future of search is,” Mr Schmidt said. “One idea is that more and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type.
“I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”

So maybe Google has figured out the future of search
[telegraph.co.uk...]

[diberry]

This has been predicted by so-called "paranoids" ever since AdSense started up: it just seemed inevitable that eventually Google would force you to buy one of the top spots rather than simply handing it over nicely with an algorithm.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Google bided their time, and tested the water with a few tactics that arguably broke US anti-trust laws, and now with Larry Page, they've done just what every other business in the US did a few years ago: turned themselves into a get rich quick scheme. They know the govt is going to come down on them, but in the meantime if they can make a few billion by forcing people to buy the top spots, of course they will. That's what this has all been about.

It is NEVER paranoid to believe that if a company keeps outgrowing its competitors, it will eventually take advantage of everything it can. That's just human nature.

[Web_speed]

It is NEVER paranoid to believe that if a company keeps outgrowing its competitors, it will eventually take advantage of everything it can. That's just human nature.

Yep.... that's precisely what i keep telling my family and friends, with a clear warning about Google's major privacy issues and relentless personal tracking ....while introducing them to Bing.

And i suggest that every responsible webmaster should do the same...let it be our little personal "panda update" to our "circles"...so to speak.

[diberry]

I'm already on that mission, Web_speed! :) But I've also been pleased to hear acquaintances complain about the weird results in Google lately, and announce they're switching to Bing (without a word from me). Clearly, it's not just us Google is annoying.

[Gibble]

And I suspect some niches got hit harder then others, especially ones that have millions of advertisers with deep pockets.

That statement simply doesn't make sense. What "niche" has millions of advertisers with deep pockets?

[aleksl]

MrSavage: Why can't the Google defenders comment on the correlation to many people talking about lost traffic, closing out sites, etc.

Web_speed:
Not so much "loss of traffic" in my case, the numbers are more or less the same. What i do see however is crap non converting traffic. My logs are full of viewers from the "wrong countries".....and there are simply no sales. It almost feels like something or someone is grubbing all my good "shoppers traffic" (from the "right" countries) and takes them elsewhere.

Where's all the "good, converting traffic" gone?

Where, oh where?

How about the poor Main street who cries wolf to the government about not fair taxes?

Do you even comprehend how big BIG business is becoming on the internet? The Walmart? The Sears? The Staples? The Office Depot? Costco, Macy's, JC Penney, Target, Gap, Kohl's, Nordstrom....
[internetretailer.com...]

In order to fit and accommodate all these multi-billion to hundred-some million dollar companies, you need lots of converting traffic, BECAUSE THESE PEOPLE PAY REAL MONEY for it.


So, you , joe webmaster, WILL GET GARBAGE until you notice.

[Web_speed]

So, you , joe webmaster, WILL GET GARBAGE until you notice.

Yep, i think you pretty much summed it all up. Very sad really... our "world" has been reduced to only one and a half major search engines that joe public would know of and use.

This is where we webmasters should step in and fill the gap, informing our users about the alternatives.

But here's the problem(!)..... does anyone know how to change the default SE on an android or iPhone/iPad and all them other "i" this and "i" that devices? .... I'm not sure you even can... wow...21st century .... deja-vu all over again.

[Silicon]

I just noticed that Adsense accounts for 2.6 billion of the 9.72 billion in revenue. Is that surprising to anyone?

[skibum]

Google revenue growth numbers should be plotted against unemployment numbers. That's a BIG chunk of money flowing directly out of local economies across the country into the economy of Google. They could probably send everyone home for a year or two and it would still go up so long as the power stayed on and the system didn't crash.

[Gibble]

Google revenue growth numbers should be plotted against unemployment numbers.

Correlation does not equal causation.