Totally agree. The people complaining about culture shifts there seem to want the company to pretend it's ~2006. I was never impressed with old Google. All their revenue came from ads, and they loss-led other projects. Fun, but the market has matured from that.
Since I joined several years ago, perks have really degraded but overall I've become more satisfied with my actual work. Over-engineered pet projects in and around our team gave way to business focus, meaning we work on truly important stuff. I have little faith in Sundar's leadership and think his speeches might as well be AI-generated, but that was always the case.
Google has been trying very hard to diversify, mostly through Cloud.
How well they are succeeding at that is up to interpretation but they are chipping away at Ads' percentage of revenue. It used to be higher than 85% but as of 2022 it's down to only being 58% of operating revenue[0].
Yes Google is still less diversified than its peers. Cloud and YouTube (edit: and Pixel phones?) are profitable afaik. The overall tech market has matured is what I meant; it's no longer time to loss-lead everything.
I'm not into watching streaming services or TV for that matter, but that would be news to me. Does YT now produce own exclusive content? I think they don't 1. to keep content producers running their stuff on YT rather than acting as competitor 2. to avoid yet another reason for antitrust action (ie. the bad looks of extending their monopoly)
Cobra Kai started on "YouTube Red" which I think was renamed "YouTube Premium"
Then it went to Netflix where it became a big hit.
There was another show I liked named Ryan Hansen Solves Crimes on Television. They constantly broke the third wall making fun of YouTube Red being confused with some kind of adult content service.
HBO is paid programming with product placement at most, and NYT sells subscriptions that actually bring in the majority of their revenue. If it were 90% ads, I'd say yeah they might want to reconsider that.
YouTube has its own content while Search ofc doesn't, and its advertising model is different. I wouldn't lump it in with Search. But still, they've decided ads aren't enough and they need YT Premium subscriptions.
It is not. Think about it. Diversification ensures that if one of your assets degrades in value, you have an unrelated asset that can still do well. Back to Alphabet, if ads revenues disappears overnight, Youtube becomes a dead project. Simples
At least they have alternate ways of selling ads, though. For example there has been a lot of talk about how their search business ads are threatened by LLMs that answer questions directly instead of giving search results that include paid placements, etc. But even if that happened, it likely wouldn’t affect YouTube ad revenues much.
Is it? If some new thing came along tomorrow that made Google's ad exchange obsolete, they could still sell ads on YouTube using whatever the new thing is. Or if YouTube became untenable, they'd have the ad exchange.
In 2022, premium subscribers accounted for a bit less than 9% of YouTube's audience (and 67% of premium subscribers were in the US), according to this:
No data for this, but I feel like 9% is less than they expected after 5 years of the "frustrate and seduce" strategy, which is why they're even going after ad-blockers now. If anything, they look frustrated. But they probably had to do this.
Why would they want people using an ad blocker to even use the site that much though. They’re denying them revenue while costing them. I mean it’s great as a user but as a service there’s not really much upside.
YouTube didn't seem to mind so much before. Maybe they wanted to keep those users' attention on YouTube instead of elsewhere. Now they're a lot more focused on the profits, which is fine.
I was about to correct you about GCP profitability, but I just looked it up, and TIL that GCP became profitable for the first time in 2023 Q2. Interesting.
Which is precisely why profit is a red herring. What matters is market share (which for GCP is still 10%, not amazing but gradually increasing) and, ultimately, revenue growth.
GCP burns massive amounts of cash and was a loss for many years. It just barely pulled a profit this year, though it looks more like some accounting tricks to make a small negative number look like a small positive one to make things look better during a downturn.
IIRC most of the public clouds changed their depreciation accounting recently. So all that cloud hardware is now good for 20 years instead of 10 years or something. Quite a boost to the old bottom line when you do that.
I loved old google they refused to share a business model. Google ~2006 I think is just past peaked google. I think they developed ads because it was the only model that fit their valuation.
Could be, they also had a pre-iso valuation that needed justifying. The signal to me that it was really over was when they stopped supporting jabber/XMPP and look where it go them. I never experienced Google as a stock. My only experience with google is as a search engine and a mail delivery system that broke all the rules of polite society.
Could be "Don't be evil" was the answer to the business model question of early google. My memory is that it spawned during an interview with Larry and Sergey regarding the business model.
Since I joined several years ago, perks have really degraded but overall I've become more satisfied with my actual work. Over-engineered pet projects in and around our team gave way to business focus, meaning we work on truly important stuff. I have little faith in Sundar's leadership and think his speeches might as well be AI-generated, but that was always the case.