Company / division: Google
Google and Cisco Partner for Hybrid Cloud Environments (Aug 3, 2017)
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YouTube Reportedly Begins Offering Player as a Platform for Third Party Sites (Aug 1, 2017)
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Google Says it Plans to Train 10 Million Africans in Online Skills (Jul 27, 2017)
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Google is Finally Planning to Merge YouTube and Google Music Services (Jul 27, 2017)
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Google Attempts to Use US Courts to Overturn Canadian Copyright Ruling (Jul 25, 2017)
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★ Alphabet Announces Strong Growth, Beats on Earnings in Q2 Results (Jul 24, 2017)
Alphabet announced its Q2 2017 earnings this afternoon, and beat analysts’ estimates of revenue and earnings pretty handily, yet its stock still fell 3% in the first couple of hours afterwards, presumably because the stock has been bid up so much in recent weeks and there’s some profit taking going on. The results were pretty strong across the board, with no area of performance looking weak. The core Google business continues to grow rapidly, with the same three drivers – mobile, YouTube, and programmatic – cited once again, suggesting there’s still been no material longer term fallout at Google from the boycott against it earlier this year or the programmatic cutbacks that have followed. It’s clear that Google is investing heavily in its cloud infrastructure and personnel – CFO Ruth Porat said on the call that many of the 1600 new hires this quarter were once again directed at that part of its business. That business is still frustratingly buried in the broader Google “Other” segment along with disparate bits and pieces like Google Play and hardware revenues, so it’s impossible to parse precisely, but it’s likely that the growth of cloud services is a big contributor to overall growth in that segment. But hardware was also called out, though only Google Home and Google WiFi were called out specifically, suggesting Pixel sales are no longer such a big driver. My own recent surveys suggest Google Home in particular is selling well, taking about half the share that Amazon Echo does, with almost no other competitors in the market. The Other Bets continue to shrink their still massive losses, mostly by growing revenue faster, though the company has also reduced its capital expenditures significantly since the Google Fiber retrenchment began in late October last year. Alphabet did account for the EU fine, which it has not yet decided to pay, in its financials, but also provided a version of its profit figures which was more easily comparable with last year’s, and those showed strong growth in both revenues and profits. At this point, it’s hard to see a near-term reason for bearishness about Google or the broader Alphabet business – it now has several separate lines running well and throwing off decent profits, while it’s investing in others that should drive both in future. The one other thing worth noting, though, is that traffic acquisition costs for Google’s own sites continue to rise rapidly, with the rise driven by the payouts Google has to make to mobile vendors who send traffic its way, including Apple, Samsung, and to a lesser extent other Android vendors. That certainly doesn’t seem to be affecting profits yet, but it’s a sign of the increasing share of revenue Google is having to pay out to companies that control much of the traffic that comes its way on mobile.
via Alphabet
Sensor Tower Says Mobile Game Revenue Up 32% Year on Year in Q2 (Jul 24, 2017)
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Regulators and Academics Begin Pondering Breaking up Big Tech Companies (Jul 24, 2017)
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Verizon Accused of Throttling Netflix and YouTube, Says Testing Video Optimization (Jul 21, 2017)
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Google is Working with Publishers to Detect and Combat Ad Spoofing (Jul 21, 2017)
Business Insider reports that Google has been working with a number of big publishers to detect and combat a form of ad fraud known as spoofing, where ad inventory purporting to be available on a major site is in fact merely offering space on little visited sites spoofing those domains. It’s apparently found that there’s lots of this activity going on, and at the same time is pushing an industry standard called ads.txt which aims to get each publisher to host a text file listing the ad exchanges with which it’s working and thereby make it easier to establish which inventory is legitimate and which isn’t. Ad fraud in various forms is one of several big issues which threaten to undermine the online ad industry, along with viewability and measurement issues, ads showing up against the wrong content, and so on. Cutting down on spoofing would go some way to reducing at least this one form of ad fraud.
via Business Insider
YouTube TV Adds 10 New Markets with Local Channels (Jul 20, 2017)
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Study Finds Publication Recall is Poor for News Reached through Search and Social (Jul 20, 2017)
A study from Oxford University suggests that people who read news articles they find through search engines or social media have much poorer recall of the names of the publications than those who visit those sites directly. Those finding articles through search recalled the names correctly 37% of the time two days later, while those going through social channels recalled 47% correctly, compared with 81% for direct visitors. That’s entirely what I would expect anecdotally, but it’s still stark, and a good indicator of why news organizations seem so unhappy with the role of companies like Google and Facebook even though they seem little pacified by those companies’ efforts to better meet their needs. At root, this isn’t just a monetization or traffic problem but a fundamental disintermediation of the relationship between these publications and their audiences, which causes much lower brand recall and loyalty and removes much of the power to drive traffic from the publications themselves. That’s pretty much impossible to fix, and that’s a challenge both for news publishers and for the platforms, which would like to smooth things over with them but are relatively powerless to do so without big changes in the way they operate. However, the details of the study are well worth reading too – the differences aren’t consistent across publications, suggesting that at least some have broken through the challenges of aggregation and established distinctive enough brands for themselves to achieve recall anyway, so there is at least some hope. The whole article here is well worth a read.
Google Upgrades Feed, its Google Now Replacement (Jul 19, 2017)
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Amazon’s Video Direct Program Starting to Generate Meaningful Revenue for Creators (Jul 17, 2017)
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Judge Rules Google Doesn’t Have to Hand Over All Records Requested by DoL (Jul 17, 2017)
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Siri Usage Reported to Fall as Alexa and Cortana Grow (Jul 12, 2017)
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Google’s Second Generation Pixel XL Renders Leak, with LG as ODM (Jul 11, 2017)
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Google Officially Launches Gradient Ventures, Engineer-Led AI Fund (Jul 11, 2017)
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Google Pays Professors and Researchers to Produce Pro-Google Papers (Jul 11, 2017)
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Major Newspapers Seek Legal Cover for Collective Bargaining with Facebook and Google (Jul 10, 2017)
The News Media Alliance, an industry group representing major newspapers, is beginning a push, launched with an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal from its president, to get permission from Congress to act collectively in negotiating with Facebook and Google. I’m linking here to a piece in the New York Times on the topic, but it’s from the media columnist and therefore almost as much opinion as reporting, something I’ve found with most of the stories on this, which feels a little ironic. But the thrust of both the op-ed and the opinion side of the New York Times piece is that the news industry is being lorded over by the digital giants, and that single publications or even media groups are powerless to negotiate better relationships without being able to bargain collectively. That, in turn, would be a violation of antitrust rules unless Congress were to pass legislation providing legal cover, something it seems rather unlikely to do, especially in the current political climate. The op-ed is disingenuous to say the least – this is the money quote, in my opinion: “But the two digital giants don’t employ reporters: They don’t dig through public records to uncover corruption, send correspondents into war zones, or attend last night’s game to get the highlights. They expect an economically squeezed news industry to do that costly work for them.” That feels like a distortion of the true relationship here, which is that Google and Facebook both point people to the content those people find interesting, including content from major newspapers. If those newspapers decide to make that content available for free either on their sites or through Instant Articles or AMP, that’s their decision. But that’s not nearly the same as those companies doing that work “for” Google or Facebook. While the idea that the newspapers face an imbalance of power in negotiating individually with Facebook and Google has more merit, it’s also disingenuous to argue that these two companies are somehow singlehandedly responsible for the inequitable distribution of advertising revenue between them, given their respective audience sizes and all else that ails newspapers and their business models. At the same time, it’s worth noting that Facebook is pushing ahead with its plans for subscriptions and other improvements to how it works with publishers, but publications including the New York Times continue to be skeptical of those changes, which makes one wonder just what these papers would kind of relationship with these companies the papers would find acceptable. All of this merely reinforces my sense that the companies don’t really have any solutions to propose, but in fact are angling for some kind of punitive regulatory action against these companies on the basis of their size and influence.