They can't juice, because advertisers are now good in calculating conversion rate, roas, cpa, etc, so they would shift budgets to other channels like overnight if see Google underperforming.
Wow, that X post is the most succinct but persuasive and damning thing I've read about Google's ad business developments in years (I don't watch it particularly closely.) Thanks!
Random anecdotes like this don't equate to "company juicing their numbers". You need much stronger evidence than that to make such an assertion. There are legal and financial ramifications for lying, companies are audited, there are official forms and documents that public companies must file. Of course a company can lie on those forms, but in the case of a company like Google you need extraordinary, factual evidence to make claims like "they've been juicing their numbers".
You basically have to say, everyone from the CEO/CFO, to the auditors, the financial analysts, the legal team, and all the way down are all lying and this random guy on Twitter is telling the truth. Sorry, not buying it.
See the replies to that tweet. I agree, one swallow does not a spring make; but here there's a pattern. Ask anybody who does search advertising, and you'll hear the same story too many times for it to just be a coincidence.
Their earnings missed by almost 30%, which is pretty huge in the stock market.
I think the bigger concern is that earnings misses are very rare for GOOG, and historically they've been able to hit almost any target that Wall Street expects. Their past earnings misses were all related to major macroeconomic events (2020Q1, which was the COVID shutdowns, 2022 all year with inflation from the COVID/Ukraine + rate hikes, and 2019Q3 with the taper tantrum from Fed rate hikes), and most of them were more in the 5% range. A 30% miss, particularly with slowing revenue growth in their core business despite almost full monetization of commercial queries, could indicate that the golden goose is disintegrating.
For that matter, GOOG has been extremely correlated with macroeconomic indicators since about 2018, which means investors in the rest of the stock market should probably watch out. It's likely we're already in recession but don't know it.
am i remembering correctly that "google cloud" in the earnings isn't just developer's google cloud bills (that's google cloud platform), it's also basically any product where a consumer or enterprise pays money to google for anything other than advertising - google drive storage, gemini pro, enterprise google workspace plans...
Not quite. Google Cloud is GCP, Workspace and Gemini Enterprise. Consumer products subscriptions like Youtube premium, Google storage and even Gemini (consumer) fall under "Google subscriptions", which is part of Google Services
> basically any product where a consumer or enterprise pays money to google for anything other than advertising
Not exactly - the consumer stuff (subscriptions and devices) falls under services, while cloud covers GCP, Workspace, and enterprise-specific cloud services (like maps etc).
Basically if you pay for it with a monthly sub on a personal google account (including Gemini stuff like Ai pro) it's services.
Others want to nitpick but generally yes, before we had AI, the last craze was cloud, so they shuffled things around to the point that everything was "cloud". This is also how Oracle got to be the biggest "cloud" in the world!
Google really had developed only 2 good products(not including acquisitions such as YouTube): search and gmail. Their primary cow to milk has been search. The rest (I.e cloud compute) is not really a moat.
I think we are facing a revolution/rotation where the these companies may start to become just “old businesses”(I.e IBM, AOL).
I don't really agree: it's pretty simplistic to boil Google's history down to two products developed 20 years ago.
I'm not really sure why you say that cloud compute isn't a moat. It's an enormous investment to compete there; there's a reason even large companies buy compute from GCP/Azure/AWS or even if they have their own compute don't attempt to compete. Additionally, GCP has been an enormously successful 'bet' for Google over the past decade.
Google has also turned subscription revenue for their various services into a major revenue stream; it'd be hard to call those various services (Google Drive, Google Play, etc.) anything other than successful.
Chrome doesn't generate revenue by itself, but it certainly drives advertising revenue across the rest of Google's portfolio and was developed in-house.
Finally, it's pretty strange to credit the success of YouTube as a revenue stream with a small loss-making company that was acquired in 2006 rather than Google, who has run it for the past 20 years.
> GCP has been an enormously successful 'bet' for Google over the past decade.
I disagree on this. It's not clear how much money they are actually making and how much revenues are shifted over from other business lines to GCP because GCP earnings growth is / was valued higher than other business lines by the markets.
I’m sure with Chrome,
Google has smart people calculating the value of the data that they get from it. It doesn’t make money directly but it’s gotta be a huge money maker.
Chrome logs every site you visit with the mothership, and that is very valuable data to Google. That allows them to spot, in realtime, trending sites for example. They see what the users are doing on the Internet in realtime and act accordingly.
It’s 2026, I would absolutely say Google “Developed” Google Maps and Android even if they did not “create” it originally. At what point can we attribute the success of these products to Google as a developer instead of Google the buyer.
Android had a market share of 0, with no released products when they bought it. The 80%+ market share today was all Google.
Google Maps was purchased (pre Google IPO), but the original (“Where2”) was a desktop application. Google completed rebuilt it alongside the acquisition of other data sources, and released the web page. Years later, they built a mobile app which became one of the biggest apps of all time. Should we not attribute that success to Google instead of the Australian startup building a desktop app?
Look I'm Google's #1 hater but this is just goofy lol. There are multiple buildings full of Android developers, and have been for at least a decade; to say that it's not "made" by them is a huge stretch. Technically all of their products are just ripoffs of Sun & Xerox, right? Or Turing & Church, I suppose!
When YouTube was acquired by Google, it was already pretty similar in shape as a product to what it is now. The biggest differences are scale, the addition of advertising, and ancillary integration with other Google services. The first is a function of growth, the second is exactly what Google would be expected to do to monetize the service, and the third is another logical implication of "acquisition". (You could quibble and say they added vertical shorts and live video, but I don't think those are even fundamentally different from a product perspective from what YouTube was already doing in 2006, just fast-forwarded to adapt to the consumer technology we have today).
That's very different from Android, which was an unreleased prototype that had zero users and was dramatically different even from what ended up shipping as the first product, let alone what it is today. Android at acquisition would be unrecognizable from what the majority of people worldwide are typing on this very minute.
Why separate out products developed internally versus acquired and growth? There is an almost moralistic element in the tone of “well they just bought it”. Sure, they bought it and grew it into a behemoth, plus what really matters is not the provenance but how much money it makes for them. Plus, it’s reasonable to call YouTube (and instagram, which also gets the same treatment) two of the all time best corporate acquisitions. It’s not easy to buy a company and grow it like that.
Not a moat and not big but... for SMEs "Google Workspace" is a godsend from outter space.
This is what allow little SMEs to not have to suffer that piece of shit that Windows is. I know people running their SMEs (and I helped them set up Google Workspace) from Mac and Chromebooks since years and years and who do not ever want to here again from anything Microsoft.
They're basically doing everything inside "Google Workspace" (formerly "G Suite", formerly "Google apps for domain" because Google's product naming is just confusing).
Gemini is also IMO excellent for everything that is not coding. It's really rare that I use Anthropic models (which I pay a subscription for) for anything else than coding.
GMail / Drive / Google Docs / Google Spreadsheets are great for a shitload of SMEs out there who want to give Windows and Office the middle finger.
> Gemini is also IMO excellent for everything that is not coding. It's really rare that I use Anthropic models (which I pay a subscription for) for anything else than coding.
I use Gemini Pro for every day stuff and Opus is much better than it. A lot more features and everything works better, especially in the websites. Gemini is just... dumber overall. I had a project/gem (now replaced by a skill) and sometimes I'd start with them and then veer of course along the way. Gemini would religiously follow the initial context, stupidly, while Opus realized that a good chunk if it wasn't needed anymore after my last prompt and did the right thing.
It's absurd to say that Google did not develop YouTube. They acquired it at a point where it was a galaxy-scale cash incinerator and made it work economically using their superior platform.
When Google bought YouTube, it already had Google Video. Google saw that YouTube had market traction and pivoted quickly, to its (and YouTube's) credit.
those geniuses that made acq. grow all have big retirement exit btw. Nobody in google worth low digit NW if they have been there for +10Y, so yeah they bet on their work and beat market for several years
That’s nonsense. What about Maps, Sheets, Android, Meet, Chrome, Cloud etc. I don’t even know how you can exclude YouTube. It’s basically something they’ve worked on for more than a decade at this point. The number of google products we all use on a daily basis is pretty stunning.
I don't think the question of "good products" is really relevant here; the important aspect is profitable products. And in that arena, nothing beats the money printer!
They used to have a second minimint in AdSense et. al. ("Display Advertising"), but that shrinks by the year economy-wide as the vicious cycle of data tracking, ad blocking, and paywall dodging continues. Now it's a mere $7B[1], compared to $11B for Youtube (technically also Display Advertising but it gets its own segment now, I guess) and $63B from the money printer proper.
[1] Actual report here: https://s206.q4cdn.com/479360582/files/doc_financials/2026/q... Interestingly, display revenues are slightly up! But still, in Google land, "slightly up" is potentially a scandalous failure. Perhaps they settled into better agreements with big publishers ("sell side") after it became clear that they wouldn't actually be punished for having a Display Ads monopoly, despite losing the antitrust case brought by Biden's DoJ.
For me Google has stayed as the default interface, if I need to ask a basic query (probably searches that don't yield much revenue but keeps me on Google), the results were becoming worse a 1-3 years ago but now the AI parts of Google is now good-enough(TM) that I mostly don't need to go to a separate interface, as long as users aren't fleeing they can probably continue to get paid for ADs (also the if YT ads are included, those have really become obnoxious but probably well monetized).
How would you expect search forecasts to be met if most of the time you get "are you a robot" or clanker summaries if you are lucky.
Search no longer works and you are killing your most important product with AI that nobody wants. If search worked like in 2010, no one would use AI answers.
Retail is just a bad business. The ad business is many times more profitable than cloud business because of the margins. Cloud isn’t a money printer when compared to advertising.
There's nothing intrinsic about Google search that makes it a monopoly. Monopolies usually hold their position because regulations make it prohibitive for competitors to form or because they control a rare resource. Google search does neither of these two things. Its just a better product compared to everything else out there and the market reflects that.
Monopolies hold because companies engage in foul play to hold their monopolies. When Google goes out and pays Apple billions to default to Google Search, that is not a regulatory hurdle, nor is Google using its position as the Android platform maintainer and bundling Google Search with Play Services.
"Search" is a borderline obsolete concept. There is no separation between search, AI, information retrieval, knowledge synthesis, information tasks, etc.
Gemini is terrible, it's trash especially after downgrading to the free version. I have to prompt it two to three times for it to understand what I am asking it. It seemed better when I was paying for it while it's free competitor models (the other 4) always answer me right away.
you're not really the ideal customer. They're probably going to market to enterprise people because Claude/ChatGPT will become too expensive when they IPO and won't have any other revenue stream unlike Google/MS.
You basically have to say, everyone from the CEO/CFO, to the auditors, the financial analysts, the legal team, and all the way down are all lying and this random guy on Twitter is telling the truth. Sorry, not buying it.
And given all the replies to that post on Twitter, it sounds like it's true.
I think the bigger concern is that earnings misses are very rare for GOOG, and historically they've been able to hit almost any target that Wall Street expects. Their past earnings misses were all related to major macroeconomic events (2020Q1, which was the COVID shutdowns, 2022 all year with inflation from the COVID/Ukraine + rate hikes, and 2019Q3 with the taper tantrum from Fed rate hikes), and most of them were more in the 5% range. A 30% miss, particularly with slowing revenue growth in their core business despite almost full monetization of commercial queries, could indicate that the golden goose is disintegrating.
For that matter, GOOG has been extremely correlated with macroeconomic indicators since about 2018, which means investors in the rest of the stock market should probably watch out. It's likely we're already in recession but don't know it.
which exactly earning number missed by 30%?..
Not exactly - the consumer stuff (subscriptions and devices) falls under services, while cloud covers GCP, Workspace, and enterprise-specific cloud services (like maps etc).
Basically if you pay for it with a monthly sub on a personal google account (including Gemini stuff like Ai pro) it's services.
[0]https://abc.xyz/investor/faqs-and-general-information/
I'm not really sure why you say that cloud compute isn't a moat. It's an enormous investment to compete there; there's a reason even large companies buy compute from GCP/Azure/AWS or even if they have their own compute don't attempt to compete. Additionally, GCP has been an enormously successful 'bet' for Google over the past decade.
Google has also turned subscription revenue for their various services into a major revenue stream; it'd be hard to call those various services (Google Drive, Google Play, etc.) anything other than successful.
Chrome doesn't generate revenue by itself, but it certainly drives advertising revenue across the rest of Google's portfolio and was developed in-house.
Finally, it's pretty strange to credit the success of YouTube as a revenue stream with a small loss-making company that was acquired in 2006 rather than Google, who has run it for the past 20 years.
I disagree on this. It's not clear how much money they are actually making and how much revenues are shifted over from other business lines to GCP because GCP earnings growth is / was valued higher than other business lines by the markets.
> not including acquisitions
Of which only Chrome is in-house created. I wouldn't think Chrome brings in a lot of revenue, and these days I'd argue FF is a much better product.
Google didn't create Android or Maps. Android was made in 2003 by other people. Maps was Keyhole and something made in Australia.
I don't know enough about Chrome to say.
Android had a market share of 0, with no released products when they bought it. The 80%+ market share today was all Google.
Google Maps was purchased (pre Google IPO), but the original (“Where2”) was a desktop application. Google completed rebuilt it alongside the acquisition of other data sources, and released the web page. Years later, they built a mobile app which became one of the biggest apps of all time. Should we not attribute that success to Google instead of the Australian startup building a desktop app?
It's safe to say Google brought Android to the level it is now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_%28operating_system%29...
To clarify in good faith: what percentage of Android development do you think went on before 2005 in, let's say, mythical man months. 5%? 1%? Less?
That's very different from Android, which was an unreleased prototype that had zero users and was dramatically different even from what ended up shipping as the first product, let alone what it is today. Android at acquisition would be unrecognizable from what the majority of people worldwide are typing on this very minute.
As a simple example, a week ago we had the GCP outage in UK, their status page said all was good.
This is what allow little SMEs to not have to suffer that piece of shit that Windows is. I know people running their SMEs (and I helped them set up Google Workspace) from Mac and Chromebooks since years and years and who do not ever want to here again from anything Microsoft.
They're basically doing everything inside "Google Workspace" (formerly "G Suite", formerly "Google apps for domain" because Google's product naming is just confusing).
Gemini is also IMO excellent for everything that is not coding. It's really rare that I use Anthropic models (which I pay a subscription for) for anything else than coding.
GMail / Drive / Google Docs / Google Spreadsheets are great for a shitload of SMEs out there who want to give Windows and Office the middle finger.
I could make this make sense either way
I use Gemini Pro for every day stuff and Opus is much better than it. A lot more features and everything works better, especially in the websites. Gemini is just... dumber overall. I had a project/gem (now replaced by a skill) and sometimes I'd start with them and then veer of course along the way. Gemini would religiously follow the initial context, stupidly, while Opus realized that a good chunk if it wasn't needed anymore after my last prompt and did the right thing.
As it would have done naturally either way
When Google bought YouTube, it already had Google Video. Google saw that YouTube had market traction and pivoted quickly, to its (and YouTube's) credit.
TV had both 15-20 minute of ad breaks every hour AND product placement during actual content.
That's where we're going in about 10-15 years.
Everything they make from within flops 99% of the time.
They used to have a second minimint in AdSense et. al. ("Display Advertising"), but that shrinks by the year economy-wide as the vicious cycle of data tracking, ad blocking, and paywall dodging continues. Now it's a mere $7B[1], compared to $11B for Youtube (technically also Display Advertising but it gets its own segment now, I guess) and $63B from the money printer proper.
[1] Actual report here: https://s206.q4cdn.com/479360582/files/doc_financials/2026/q... Interestingly, display revenues are slightly up! But still, in Google land, "slightly up" is potentially a scandalous failure. Perhaps they settled into better agreements with big publishers ("sell side") after it became clear that they wouldn't actually be punished for having a Display Ads monopoly, despite losing the antitrust case brought by Biden's DoJ.
:(
Search was $63.4B "Everything else" was $64.2B, out of which GCP was $30.7B
Is AI on the 33.5B remaining post GCP? or within the 30.7 of GCP?
Search no longer works and you are killing your most important product with AI that nobody wants. If search worked like in 2010, no one would use AI answers.
So if you need tl;dw or something to do with YouTube video, gemini is the most seamless
Also, of course, before anyone even realized the game was on at Google, Anthropic and OpenAI already downloaded the entirety of YouTube.