Alphabet Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2016 Results – Alphabet (Jan 26, 2017)

One of the things I was most interested in as part of Alphabet’s results was what happened to the Google Other category of revenues, because that’s where sales of the new hardware devices will be reported. That category grew 62% year on year, but also includes Play store revenues as well as Google’s enterprise cloud service revenues, and has been growing at a decent clip already. I’d estimate around $600-700m in revenue from the new hardware products, which probably translates into 600-700k Pixel sales and sales of Home, WiFi, and Daydream hardware. That’s not a bad start, but of course supply was constrained and distribution limited, so there’s clearly potential for more here. Back in the core business, it’s striking how the number of paid “clicks” on Google’s own properties remains the one big driver of ad revenue growth, while total paid clicks on third party sites and the cost per click on all sites continues to fall. YouTube is the major driver here (those clicks include views of video ads where no-one actually clicks), offsetting the erosion of revenues from the shift from desktop to mobile, and was an obsession among analysts on the call. Sundar Pichai focused his remarks on machine learning rather than AI, although the two topics are closely related – it was interesting to hear Satya Nadella kick off the Microsoft earnings call an hour later with talk of AI.

You might also be interested in the Alphabet Q4 2016 deck which is part of the Jackdaw Research Quarterly Decks Service.

via Alphabet (more on Techmeme)


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