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Comment by wafflesraccoon | Hacker News Reader

Who is the biggest advertising company? Google?

Unless something changed recently, I believe that $95bn of advertising revenue makes them the biggest advertising company in the world :)

They are the medium, not the advertising company, the same way a tv channel is the medium, not the advertising company. WPP, Omnicom, Dentsu, those are advertising companies. You are conflating here two different things.

they are distribution, just like the agencies. Only Google drives distribution costs down

Probably WPP or Omnicom.

Google.

By a factor of 30

30? More like 5. Still a good point.

Revenue vs market cap

Omnicom: $15B revenue annually, $17B market cap WPP: $18B revenue, $23B market cap Google: $110B revenue, $750B market cap

Seems like a good argument that being tech-forward provides a multiplier on value versus doing the same old thing, if you believe that these are all just advertising companies.

> Google: $110B revenue

Where did you get 110 from? I'm seeing 90 for last year.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOGL/financials?p=GOOGL

$110B total revenue for 2017

That's all revenue, including non-advertising revenue.

True, the ad revenue was $95B.

Yeah, I screwed up and was looking at the wrong number.

Hardly a fair comparison, considering Google's extensive non-advertising product offerings

Extensive non-advertising product offerings that somehow don't translate into extensive non-advertising revenue...

Those "other revenues" only account for about 13% of Google's revenue. So its a fair comparison. Google is almost 90% an advertising company.

https://abc.xyz/investor/pdf/2017Q4_alphabet_earnings_releas...

Yes because all those apps exist... to funnel people towards Google's extensive advertising network, so the money shows up as adbiz revenue instead of with products.

So, by pursuing other technological innovations, they are able to expand their advertising business?

"if you believe that these are all just advertising companies."

I'm not the one calling Google an all-advertising company, I'm just saying that if it is, it's by far the biggest.

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