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Comment by hamana | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't affect Adwords for search results. That is the real cash cow that is growing each year by double digit percentages.

Doubleclick and Adsense on the other hand are starting to slow down and make up less share of Google's overall revenue [1]. In 2004 it was 50% of their revenue, now it's 20% and it's probably going to shrink even further as AdWords revenue and other revenues(cloud, apis) increase.

  > [1] http://www.statista.com/statistics/266471/distribution-of-googles-revenues-by-source/

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Correct, this does not impact AdWords (save for publishers who are displaying AdWords results in AdSense modules, but that's a trivial amount of money). It does hit DoubleClick/AdSense/Google Display Network. It also hits the massive display advertising industry (most of which partner with Google for distribution). Billions of dollars are spent on display ad targeting through DMP audience segments. Facebook would instantly be the highest quality DMP on the market.

Another thing to mention is that Google reports its Network Members revenue as a gross revenue, not their cut. It would be like eBay reporting $80b in revenue, not their cut ($8b). So, Google in '14 reported $14 billion in revenue for Network Members, but 70% of that is sent to publishers. Their 'real' revenue would be around $4 billion. On the other hand, ad revenue for Google websites (search engines) was $45 billion. Google makes many times more money from its search engines than all the publishers in the world on Google Network Members combined. That's a cash cow.

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