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Comment by chollida1 | Hacker News Reader

Numbers:

- Q1 EPS $24.63 Est 25.71

- Q1 Add Rev $54.66B, Est $54.14B

- Q1 Cloud Loss of $931M, still not sure how they can't compete with Azure and Amazon here? This is a slight improvement YoY. Though cloud revenue was up 43%

- Q1 Services Rev of 61.47B

- Q1 Other Bets lost $1.16B

- Q1 Other Bets Rev $440M

- Q1 Re $68.01, Est $67.98

- looks like they are reporting a loss(1.2B) this quarter, which is a big swing YoY where they made a profit of 4.9B

- youtube Add Rev 6.9B, bit of a miss here, TikTok is starting to affect google growth finally, they already have affected Meta's add revenue, maybe related also to iPhone privacy changes?

- Authorized to buyback up to $70B in shares, that's a large number and indicates someone at google thinks rev is slowing down, see TikTok

Misc:

- shares down slightly, but negligible.

- numbers for Q1 shouldn't be affected by Russia but next quarter will be interesting

- want to see how their US vs rest numbers work out as that should indicate where they'll hold cash and therefor where they'll look for take over targets next.

- specifically for their cloud offering, sooner or later they'll get it working

- note to watch Meta as alot of people will use GOOG advertising numbers as a proxy for how screwed META will be with the iPhone privacy changes going forward.

View on HN

Anecdotally, I spend a reasonable amount of time on YouTube (perhaps an hour per day), and recently (6–12 months) the frequency of ads has noticeably increased.

It’s so notable that I can’t help but think overall watch time has flattened but they’re desperate to continue increasing revenue. Although at some point they’re likely to go into a downward spiral where they annoy too many users. I’m not there yet, but I’m on the trajectory.

The ads have increased and the number of different ones have decreased; either they have less purchasers for ads for my demographic or something's going weird.

I only need so many ads for "current SAAS desperation".

Now you mention it, I’ve noticed the same. It feels like 80% of the ads I see are for HelloFresh, Monday.com, or Grammarly.

Businesses with high long-term customer value and high customer acquisition costs will always dominate these sorts of transactional ad channels.

For me, I think the type of ads have shifted a little bit too. Less German cars and carbonated sugar drinks (big brand ads) and more Home Shopping Channel type ads. And Get Rich Quick While Working From Home-testimonials.

That's what the algorithm thinks you are now

I bet it will be more random ads in the future as restriction are put on targeted advertising and blocking of cookies.

Pro tip. For YouTube use FireFox and Ublock Origin to block the adds.

Do you need to set that up somehow? I use Firefox and UB Origin, and I get lots of ads.

no it is automatic there is no setup.

Make sure to update and enable more of the custom blocklists in uBo if you are still getting ads.

I would refresh your firefox and reinstall the extention.

I'm on Android and have done no extra config other than use Firefox and install ublock add-on. I get nearly zero ads. Plus I think there's an add-on that allows you to continue listening with screen locked.

also works on chrome and edge chrome with ublock origin.

and on safari using the Wipr extension from the Mac app store

oo i need to check this one out is it for ipad also?

Yea it works but I wonder when they will slowly start to deter uBlock because they are losing hundreds of millions of dollars on both Google and YouTube.

Chrome/Edge Chromium actively prevent cname uncloaking.

Effectively a nerfed version of ublock origin.

Nevermind the manifest v3 changes being introduced very soon which dramatically limits the capabilities of ublock origin to some limited sub-100k static filters.

For reference I have a block list of 800k filters + dynamic filtering on Firefox.

If you want to have a sane version of the web, switch to Firefox.

In my experience, Youtube ads return on Chrome for a few days every time there's a new Chrome update. Never had that happen with Firefox.

Alternatively, if you want to kill advertisement based culture, Youtube premium costs $12/month. At an hour of watching a day, that's only $0.40/per hour. Bonus: The channels you watch on Youtube make way more from prenium viewers and are less beholden to being advertiser friendly.

No worries, I bet they will put ads for subscribers too, citing “loss of users” as a reason.

It's almost certain. They will follow the Netflix model. Plan right now is $12/month. It will soon be $15, then $20. Because they care about their price-conscious customers, they will then offer a $12/month subsidized plan with ads. How nice of them to offer us the choice.

That would be a great way to get me to both stop paying for their service AND start blocking ads. I'd just send $10/month to my preferred creators' Patreons instead, or something. I already put up with their frankly terrible music service because it comes bundled with ad-free YouTube; I'd probably be better off.

I realize I could do this now and it's probably better for the creators overall, but knowing that everyone I watch gets a little something, whether I subscribe to them or not, is nice.

I pay this to get rid of Google's inserted ads, but it's getting hurt by too many in-video sponsorship ads. I would pay for a mode where the content creator gets more money in exchange for automatically skipping their sponsorship ad.

The like/subscribe/become a Patreon is also annoying, but not as bad as actual ads.

Depending on the popularity of the content you consume you can use https://sponsor.ajay.app/ which is a crowdsourced way of skipping the in-video sponsorship ads. I've had it work for some relatively obscure channels and it reliably works for most any popular/large channels as well.

I have a zero-tolerance ad policy. If there isn't a way for me to reliably skip ads I will stop consuming the content. I'm willing to pay but all too often you end up paying for an ad-free experience and eventually ads get re-introduced anyway or the ads take on another form.

Pardon the language but fuck advertisements. If it isn't a dry, boring information-based ad I don't care for it. I have no tolerance for the emotional manipulation and psychological warfare committed by modern advertisements. I'm sick of seeing [attractive people enjoying time spent together while <using/eating/drinking> <product> during a <meal/activity/social gathering>] or [commercial designed to make you laugh or smile so you associate being happy at some level with <product>]. I was sick of those commercials 20 years ago because they're all the same and I'm even more sick of them now that I'm old enough to see how they're designed to be manipulative.

Thank you for articulating this so well. I've also had a zero-tolerance ad policy for years now. My partner and I refer to ads as Brain-Pollution.

'But they really used and loved that product, they wouldn't do the add otherwise, its in your interest for sure and they are your friend so you should order it 30 days guarantee back...'

I hear you, though i can understand video makers' point of view; they are often at mercy of YT algorithm with no heads up, no recourse. Also quality content is being slowly edge out by attention grabbing mental pollution videos, actively promoted by said YT algorithm. That is one semi stable source of income for them that wont be pull from underneath them.

So I accept those ads as necessary evil. And I support few creators via patron.

The only two channels I watch that have in-video sponsorship use the TOC feature and the sponsorship is marked as a different section so it's super easy to skip. I don't want to name them in case that's not allowed, because I enjoy that they provide that feature a lot... specially because one of them is for kinda controversial content and the sponsors are usually not related to the content at all.

Nothing can be said to be certain except death, taxes, and advertising.

Youtube is hoping their premium model becomes as ubiquitous as Amazon Prime. At which point, ads will start appearing in their service. Because there is a captive market. A similar thing happened to cable TV and even Netflix is heading that way. You'll also never escape in-content advertising. Subway and KFC ads appearing in Korean dramas, etc. Content providers are going to maximize their revenue as long as they don't shed subscribers. Once enough people are paying for premium, the danger of inserting ads will vanish. Because everyone has premium and everyone else is inserting ads.

Does that block ads that the YouTubers put right in their videos?

YouTube Premium has been a great investment. I watch hours-long concerts without any interruptions now. And I can download the videos, which is another big benefit.

As much as i hate ad culture, i also hate the pay-to-make-product-not-suck model. It makes me feel manipulated.

This must cut deeply into their profits. Surely they are getting more than 40c/hour of advertising revenue

> Surely they are getting more than 40c/hour of advertising revenue

Per person? No way.

Turns out about 3.25 billion hours of Youtube is watched per month. That's 9.75bn in a quarter. Youtube's latest quarterly ad revenue was $6.869bn, or approx 70 cents per hour

This is a bit like avoiding plastic straws for environmental reasons. It's not going to change anything.

At some point, everyone who is willing to give money to avoid ads will have done so and then prices will rise and thoughts of an ad-supported cheaper tier will occur. We are seeing this with Netflix right now.

What needs to change is the unsustainable capitalist model that demands ever higher growth and profits.

Also, Google is at the heart of it, paying for yt won't make one iota of change in how they think about ads and data extraction.

I recently cancelled my Spotify subscription and switched to Youtube Music. Costs a couple $ more each month but has the added benefit of no more ads when I watch videos too!

I haven't seen an ad on YT for years for this very same reason. I'm curious about the breakdown for YT revenues for ads vs subs

It'd be an interesting to look at that, no doubt. Do they publicize that information in their quarterly reports?

purely conjecture but i think once you watch a certain amount of youtube per day they purposely pump up the ads for you so that youre incentivized to buy a premium membership.

I would bet real money that YouTube has created very accurate estimates of how many ads they can show each user before they'll reduce their consumption, and automatically adjust the number of ads accordingly.

Thus leaving us all permanently annoyed by the number of ads, but not quite enough to leave.

I've noticed that the first ad is often unskippable and the second ad will be 5-second skippable for me. I wonder if you exit YouTube when you see the 2nd ad if the ad system will learn to give you less ads?

Probably. What drove me away more than ads is that I can’t find any good content that is less than 20min long. The “algorithm” feeds me shit that, yes I’m interested in, but is longer than a sitcom! (and drove creators to optimize for longer format,I know) I realize this is by design and blah blah engagement blah blah ad revenue etc. but I yearn for the days of good interesting shit where I could queue up 10 vids and it doesn’t take me a month to burn through it all…. I want an option to tell suggestions to keep it between 3-8min long content!!!

As a creator it takes a ton of time to do editing on something 15 min vs 2 min. I would much rather created a series of 2 min videos.

As a person I have silos of interests and ideal content desires.

Sometimes I want to watch long podcasts about war and other times I want 30 second puppy videos and I don’t understand why I can’t have algorithms for both silos without separate accounts.

This is why I love LockPickingLawyer. Generally never more than 3 minutes long. Yet by confining himself to such short videos, he has to maximize the time used.

For a while it was comical because there was some 10 minute magic threshold, and so many videos danced around and around to get to that 10 min mark. I agree through, I HATE it, I've started always trying to find written articles and reviews to shortcut this misery.

TikTok is capitalizing on this too - going to be much easier to digest a ton of tiktok then a ton of long meandering youtube videos.

I just pay to remove them. It's pricey, but there is fabulous stuff on youtube I find no place else, and something for the whole family to boot.

You can remove the ads but not the fluff content that pads the videos to make them longer. How about a subscription for concise and direct content?

I think it's great that they let the content creators decide if they want to include their own ads or not. You can always skip their ads, and some of the better channels have a progress bar for the ad portion.

YouTube shows you the parts most users skipped: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9314415 (That link is for creators, but the graph overlay is shown to everyone.) I can't imagine a better tool for doing exactly what you're requesting.

This is only available to the creators, isn't it? I don't recall ever seeing this as a viewer on YouTube. I have seen it on some...less savory video sites.

That YouTube link says that it's available to viewers, and I've certainly seen it before. Perhaps there's some A/B testing still going on?

The stuff I watch is repurposed public tv from around the world and doesn’t include that, yet.

I think it's heavily weighed by type of device, more than an user. I pretty much never get ads at mobile, but get them all the time on TV - both via app on smart TV, and PS5.

ad fatigue is a feature column, this is just learned directly as part of training watch next and ads serving.

If you use YouTube regularly and you have some music subscription, I'm not sure why anyone wouldn't just buy YouTube+ or whatever it's called that gives you free streaming music + no ads on YouTube.

I bought it right when it came out just to not have ads on YouTube. Then when you got free streaming music included, it was impossible to turn down.

The plus side is that YouTube music recommendations seem to be quite good.

YouTube Premium is a necessity at this point, specially with kids. Also a better business model.

It is a fantastic service. It is a little concerning Google hasn't touched it since it matured. $17.99 for commercial free YT for a family is a bargain considering how much we use it. I have to think there is a major price increase coming.

That's already substantially more expensive than a 1080p Netflix subscription!

The rates can get grandfathered in, I still pay $14.99 for the family plan (hopefully they don't see this and come after my $3/mo)

Hmm. Grandfathered? I've had YouTube Premium Family plan for years, since it was called YouTube Red, and I think mine recently went up to $19.99

> I'm not sure why anyone wouldn't just buy YouTube+ or whatever it's called that gives you free streaming music + no ads on YouTube.

For me, it’s because YouTube is clearly going the way of cable TV, and when they finally start showing ads on those fancy paid subscriptions, I’ll have to deal with the hassle of unsubscribing.

I’ll just watch YouTube until it becomes unwatchable, at which point I’ll stop watching.

YouTube music is really bad if you're anything beyond a very casual music listener though. The feature set is abysmal.

I share YouTube Premium and Apple Music family subscriptions but if pressed would give up YT Premium before I gave up Apple Music.

Most people are very casual listeners. Like in most of their products, google seems to be targeting the majority.

Also, you're comparing different products in terms of price. YT can offer a "pro" version at an additional premium (though they probably won't... Since they focus on the main use cases)

I have ublock origin and NewPipe on the phone.

What ads?

If a hypothetical Music Streaming services has a perfect score of 10, Spotify would get 7, Apple Music would be 6 or 5.5, and Youtube Music wouldn't even score a 5.

And as usual with Google, they either dont know what they are doing or they dont seems to care about YouTube Music.

The problem is that youtube doesn't have effective competition in its niche, so most people don't have anywhere to go (tiktok and tv overlap a bit, but for lots of content types they dont)

Non-video content is also a Youtube competitor in many genres/content types. Usually the ads for it are way less annoying, too!

This is one of those fun things that you might shoot yourself into the foot by trying to estimate.

Piss a user off once and you may have a much harder chance of bringing them back. Sure, you can use the fact you drove away user X in your model for how much to annoy user Y, but that doesn't un-piss-off user X. Sooner or later, there might be a significant number of users X!

For instance, I've specifically avoided "real TV" cable packages even when I can get them for cheaper than streaming TV because my use case (sports playoffs and such) is on and off, and Comcast et al have successfully trained me that it's extremely unpleasant to cancel wired cable TV, so I'd rather pay more for something less obnoxious.

It's easy to be both "data driven" and foolishly short-sighted.

When I worked at Yahoo at the turn of the century, whenever earnings were too low on our property, we would pump up the number of ads on our pages. It's a very common and might be a good way to see if an ad-based company like Google or Meta is close to missing earnings. And for the record, I noticed the increase in ads as well, at least 2 full ads without ability to skip per viewing.

This is my experience too. I can't escape YouTube ads on my TV's app (shame on me) and I'm at the annoyance breaking point because of the recent increase.

Short term this just means using something other than the TV app. But long term (5-15 years -_- ) I think content is going to be hosted places other than YouTube. Maybe wishful thinking, but right now if I had a YouTube link and a PeerTube link to the same content I'd send my friends to PeerTube instance.

It pushed me to read more and use NewPipe. If they block NewPipe or youtube-dl I'm done. More time to read. I was fine with a few ads and now it just feels insulting.

I've also noticed they've added ads after a video ends, even when autoplay is off. Annoying, but it makes sense to show ads while browsing for the next video to watch.

YouTube Premium is easily the best value for money of all my subscriptions. Even when I'm in Asia and I get helpful warnings that "ads may appear in this location" I never see any ads.

As a bonus, in theory the creators get a cut, though I have no idea what it is. My clickthrough rate after years of watching YouTube is 0% so this seems like an improvement for them.

Since YouTube removed the downvote count I’ve stopped relying on it for information. It’s now too hard to know if what time watching is legit without it.

It might be misguided but it’s how I feel.

Same for me.

Before I would click a video and check downvotes and comments for issues.

With downvotes gone, I stopped opening videos at all. I just don't trust anymore the platform to not waste my time.

I just dont understand this take. I've never found any utility in the down votes. It never seemed to accurately represent anything let alone the quality of the video.

When what you are looking for mostly is technical content, downvotes are a good indicator.

Stuff like, how to change X in your Y car and then immediately find that the title is misleading. Or solutions to general IT problems. I just don't trust the platform anymore without being able to see red flags.

I haven't watched an ad on YouTube in years. The day they finally block clients like NewPipe will be the last day I watch YouTube.

VPN to Mexico or Turkey and then login to YouTube and subscribe to premium to remove ads for like $4/mo. Best money you'll ever spend

I no longer click through videos to check them out. Im in and then out for specific content because the ads just keep coming

If you're annoyed, just pay for the premium version without ads.

> still not sure how they can't compete with Azure and Amazon here?

People go AWS because it’s the default, easy to hire people who know it, AWS are willing to throw credits at you if you’re in the US and once you’re on the platform it’s a serious effort to get off due to weird lock-ins.

Azure has its niche in the windows market, a lot of smaller orgs are going AzureAD as a replacement (or in addition to) a normal on-prem AD solution, once you’re on the platform it’s easy to just use more of it and consume existing contracts.

It helps immeasurably that if you’re running windows workloads they “happen” to be reasonably priced, as opposed to other cloud providers.

It’s a shame, because google cloud is definitely my favourite of the public clouds, I hope it doesn’t go anywhere and I’d be extremely happy to go back to it after using AWS for a while now.

IMO:

* AWS makes the best 0th impression (the whole "nobody gets fired for choosing AWS" and as you said you can justify it based on absolutely no knowledge of it's details just purely on reputation)

* Google makes the best 1st impression, by the virtue of it's beautiful consistency of behaviour, SDK standardization, clean billing models, and overall cross-platform cohesion. It just seems like you can learn GCP faster at first.

* But AWS makes the best 2nd and subsequent impressions, as you realize consistency and clarity lacks the depth of AWS, or the true productivity gains by native services - native services Google has mostly rejected in favour of doubling down on it's K8S offering as a differentiator. While GCP can seem faster to learn, in practice building on AWS is actually faster and you can go build new full applications from scratch that you're happy operating in production quicker.

I'd challenge that. Used to work with AWS, now with GCP.

- They both throw credits at companies. - Services are similar. - Prices are similar, although Google sometimes has silly costs for "enabling" a service/API. - GCP dashboard is snappier. - AWS has good support.

I'd wager the quality of support is the main differentiator.

My experience is the opposite w.r.t. support.

But I’m in Sweden and AWS keeps sending “sales engineers” who don’t know what the product is doing under the hood.

Uh, are you paying for enterprise support? Are you referring to your AWS team's solution architect as a sales engineer?

The support team I deal with has always pulled in the actual devs from AWS if we have a particular question about a service. In terms of understanding our product we send them diagrams and they are well informed.

That's my experience with Google, actually.

I have a lot of information about how the services are functionally working underneath (under NDA, unfortunately) and what their limits are, they even informed us of their recommended course of action based on what we're trying to accomplish, they even invited me to feedback on their roadmap to understand what features are most desirable and even what UX patterns made the most sense to me, personally.

Of course, we were paying for enterprise support, but even during pre-sales they were giving us this information, I.E: when we were onboarding and before we had a contract in place.

We had an enterprise support contract with AWS too, that was the blessed provider at Ubisoft, but all I ever saw from them, upon multiple requests for technical assistance: was a dude telling me S3 is essentially magic, and that there's no such thing as a capacity limit in their cloud. Given that I managed to hit capacity limits in Googles and Microsofts Clouds pretty easily, I'm not sure I believe them.

I'm going to guess you're in North America? it feels like people in NA get a good support experience with AWS; however it's my experience that Europe gets absolutely shafted.

I believe the EU is following what america does in this regard, perhaps because of some potentially misplaced thought that the America is doing best practice. (or because Americans lead the world in software, so all software tends to support AWS natively).

If you have an enterprise contract with AWS bring it up with your AM & TAM. They will pull in direct resources from AWS.

The boat has long sailed on that job, (2016~ was when we evaluated Clouds), but we had reached out to our AM & TAM, in fact, the "sales spooge" guy was our TAM for EMEA based out of France. :)

He came back to visit us in Sweden 3 times because we kept asking for a technical contact to explain things for us.

I work for a US company now that's on AWS, the experience is very different from that.

Azure go for the legacy on prem companies, and migrate them to the cloud. Most of those companies are running windows. Overall cloud is only 5% of IT, so Azure will pass AWS in 2-3 years.

Also, azure is the most pure play from them all and constitute the majority of MS revenue , while AWS and GCP are both a side business to the core business.

> - looks like they are reporting a loss(1.2B) this quarter, which is a big swing YoY where they made a profit of 4.9B

You are looking at Other Expenses/Gains. The bottom line net income was 16,436 vs 17,930 LY -- so still a Net Profit, but down 8% YoY

If you look deeper, though, the biggest difference is actually in "other income" which itself was primarily driven by gain/loss in securities. In other words, the entire difference in net income this quarter is really a result of the markets tanking over the past few months. Google's operations are as profitable as ever.

Google's net income is up 35% if you ignore the equity numbers. Not only is Google as profitable as ever, it's quite a bit more profitable than it has been. I fully expect GOOG to open up tomorrow, maybe even climb higher than today's open.

That doesn't sound right. The operating income grew from 16.4B to 20.1B. That's 21%, not 35%?

I'm counting net income less gains from equities. $13 billion last year to $17.5 here. You're right though, probably should've just looked at change in operating income which is still a strong 21%.

The big number to me, Gain (loss) on equity securities, 2021:4,837 2022:(1,070)

I don't think their equity gains/losses have anything to do with future business outlook, so ignoring this $6 billion loss YOY I'd say this was a fantastic quarter for them. They could show more in some of their non search sectors, but excluding that equity number went fro. $13 billion in profit to $17.5 for a 35% gain.

shares down negligible? It's down 6% after hours, and was down 4% intraday which took no wind out of the sails.

lol I was going to say...

> that's a large number and indicates someone at google thinks rev is slowing down

I thought buybacks were supposed to show a sign of trust in the company and that they believe the stock is "cheap"?

Yes, seems like a bad move to buy stock if you expect it to go down.

Buybacks are submarine dividends, it means the company doesn't know what to do with the money to grow so they're giving it back to the shareholders.

Buybacks and dividends are literally the way public markets are supposed to work. Raising capital without ever giving it back = a ponzi scheme.

Anyhow buybacks are a way to give money back to investors while making each remaining share more valuable.

Shrinking float and lowering the cost of capital is still better than sitting on a pile of excess cash.

Buybacks are a valid tactic in corporate finance.

Very valid - but they can scare “growth” investors.

Growth investors don't like piles of cash doing nothing either so much. Especially with inflation.

> Authorized to buyback up to $70B in shares, that's a large number and indicates someone at google thinks rev is slowing down, see TikTok

Isn't it the opposite? It means Google thinks their stock will be undervalued, and they want to buy it back?

Depends on whether you have good capital allocators at the top. Most companies don’t, really.

Althought 70B is a large number and based on the anti-trust lens that GOOG is under I wonder if they think this is a better way to return money to the shareholders than inviting DOJ scrutiny.

The political corner of YouTube that I spend the most time on probably isn’t even on their radar, but it’s gotten to the point where almost every channel I subscribe to often mentions their out of band content on Rumble, Rokfin, Substack, etc because YouTube has been demonetizing left and right.

Oh yeah some creators are afraid of demonetizing (even though they're non-political, they're afraid the algorithm might accidently trigger on them) so they'll tell their viewers about their backup Odysee or Rumble page.

It turns out there are fewer ads on their backup pages so I tend to watch there instead on YouTube.

> - looks like they are reporting a loss(1.2B) this quarter, which is a big swing YoY where they made a profit of 4.9B

I don't see this in the statement?

As others have said, this is just loss form investments, due to the general market correction. If you want to see it in the press release, look for "Other income" in the press release (the most interesting part is on page 9).

An aside comment I wanted to say thanks for doing these posts after earnings announcements. It’s been a while since you’ve done one and I always appreciate seeing them.

> - shares down slightly, but negligible.

As of right now, shares are down $120, after being down $80 during the trading session so it's pretty huge.

> Q1 Cloud Loss of $931M, still not sure how they can't compete with Azure and Amazon here?

If you haven't analyzed the revenue and expense, this number doesn't say anything. Thay may willingly be spending more to grow, but could change stance and be profitable on Monday if they wanted to. These are numbers that sound like output, but my guess is someone had a "revenue+$1B" budget, and they spent it.

I have no clue if that's the case, but it would surprise me if Google Cloud is inately unprofitable.

> Authorized to buyback up to $70B in shares, that's a large number and indicates someone at google thinks rev is slowing down, see TikTok

Good for shareholders?

Does Add = Ad?

Their investment in research and development has increased by $1 billion. This is good news.

GCP should be a concern for the. More than a decade in and it's still facing losses. But cloud is a long game.

Tempted to sell at a loss, as opposed to waiting for the split at this point

If you own 10 at 2000 or it splits 10:1 and you own 100 at 200, what difference does the split make?

(Obviously you can buy and sell smaller units but aside from that)

Retail traders that started "investing" in the last two years have been trained to believe that stock splits means a bunch of money will pile in because the price looks cheaper. Obviously there has never been a correlation there and even less so now with the wide availability of fractional shares.

I heard it might also mean that it can then be added to the dow index which might trigger some automatic buying?

I'd expect that to be negligible because the size of funds Google is already part of (QQQ, VTI, SPY, etc. etc.) are orders of magnitude larger than ETFs that track the Dow (DIA is the only one that comes to mind).

The Dow itself is a bit of gimmick in that its value is the sum of all the prices of the stocks in the index. Meaning if Google joins at $120 but kicks out a stock that was $300 then the Dow would go down 180 points.

No, it wouldn't. The Dow is weighted for exactly this reason: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dow_Jones_Industrial_Average#C...

It also allows options trading by retail investors (options are traded in 100 share tranches, which for GOOG or AMZN right now means your minimum option trade is on an underlying value of ~$250K, meaning a 5-10% swing is... significant.). Splits make options trading more accessible to retail investors by dropping the minimum risk 10-20x which also might cause a natural demand increase.

> Obviously there has never been a correlation there and even less so now with the wide availability of fractional shares.

Splits have historically caused price bumps, so I think this isn't true.

Recent research in behavioral econ actually supports that a lower price on the ticker leads to more retail investor buy-in. I forget who, but it was a Yale professor who wrote a paper on this in the 2010s -- she gave a talk at D.E. Shaw back when I was an undergrad visiting for a summer program.

I guess all I want to say is that it's more nuanced than 'obvious' and is probably an active debate right now for economists, but I wouldn't know more exact details.

> Retail traders that started "investing" in the last two years have been trained to believe that stock splits means a bunch of money will pile in because the price looks cheaper

I have heard this exact thing debated since the late 80's, so I'm not sure what the last two years has to do with it. The fact is, whether there's a real effect there or not depends less on the precise math of the situation and a whole lot of behavioral and psychological factors. Splits goosing the stock price is a real thing that happens. It may be entirely self-perpetuating crowd-mind BS but it does still happen.

Retail has easier access to options & day trading now than in the 80's.

Stock split results in much cheaper options, which many retail day traders seem to prefer.

I might argue that a stock split to a cheaper price would increase your volatility due to the above. Though TSLA's current price might disagree with me as I think it's one of the most traded & is by no means cheap for options trading.

maybe you should get off the high horse and do some research as to the factors that could lead the stock price goes up during splits - not going to list it here due to your condescending tone

Lower share prices will increase demand from small accounts. Today there are many accounts that can't afford to rationally hold even 1 share of GOOG.

But don't fractional shares eliminate this limitation?

As pointed out elsewhere, options trading deals in lots of 100 shares, so the table stakes are very high for GOOG options right now. A split will open that up to many more traders. But also, even though they're not exactly exotic, not every brokerage account lets you trade fractional shares still. Mine don't, for example.

If you can increase demand for a finite supply, the price increases. The bet on a stock split is that the existing price was a psychological barrier for retail investors and thus the split will bring in more retail investors.

It shouldn't. But historically there was a lot of research that said that it did--admittedly many from a time when buying fractional shares was harder/costlier.

So, there is one notable way in which splits can have a practical impact on trading: options (and credit to Matt Levine for mentioning this recently). Options trading is still limited to blocks of 100. A split reduces the cost of those contracts.

I do wonder, with the relatively recent availability of fractional share ownership, if the effect of splits will be more muted in the future as retail is no longer limited to whole share purchases. But who knows, there's also a psychological aspect to this that's hard to account for.

My finance classes are at least partly a few decades out of date :-)

Another reason that I recall is that (presumably) if a company does a split, it indicates that management is confident in the future--and a reverse split presumably indicates the opposite.

>I do wonder, with the relatively recent availability of fractional share ownership, if the effect of splits will be more muted in the future

Certainly, we've seen share prices of a fair number of companies recently that would have been considered well out of "normal" ranges historically.

Another: brings in more retail traders who base their decisions on the price of the stock

They lost 6 billion on their equities compared to last years quarter. If you ignore that, which seems valid as it's fluky, they had a great quarter. Went from $13 billion in profit to $17.5. Would like to see more growth in youtube and GCP, but that's is nowhere near a facebook/netflix event.

The fact that US companies have to count unrealized gains / losses on their income statement is just absurd.

Means no (or at least fewer) surprises when it becomes realized. In the context of the scandals of the past it makes sense.

It makes sense to report them; just not as earnings or losses. It makes reasoning about earnings more annoying. I now have to subtract that out to determine how things are faring, as quarter-to-quarter, and even yearly-to-yearly moves in equities are largely noise.

Is it different in EU?

Why would you possibly sell at this time? It's a solid quarter given the circumstances.

Regarding GCP my gut feeling is Google is way too unpredictable and quick to cancel products to seriously attract big enterprises.

Anecdotally their Google Workspace offering however almost seems to be the default for smaller business that are not IT oriented or have a separate IT department.

It has a lot more to do with how bad they are at selling IT to enterprises in my experience from the European public sector, which is now a very large Azure and AWS market.

We went with Azure because it was the sort of “obvious” direction for a non-tech enterprise organisation that was already heavily windowsy and using office365, but what Microsoft and Amazon sell to enterprises is support. AWS didn’t start out so well here in Europe, which is what gave Azure the chance to catch up, but once Amazon caught on, they became more compliant with European legislation than Microsoft is. Things like guaranteeing that every employee that comes near your data is an European citizen, is one area where AWS is still better than Azure, but basically what they do that Google doesn’t, is that they listen and adopt to the needs of the trillion dollar industry.

When Teams rolled out as a new feature in Enterprise 365, as available to everyone, our techies called Seattle (I can’t spell redmund) and a few days later it was possible to not have it auto-available for everyone. When we had issues with Google education, and Google education was actually Google’s best attempt at being supportive of enterprise, we had to talk with a chatbot and eventually had to physically drive to Google Denmark to annoy someone to get real support because our sales rep was on vacation.

I’m not sure if you know this, but a major part of selling IT to enterprise is to sell the CTOs the ability to say “yes, email is down, but our guys are working directly with the people at Amazon/Microsoft headquarters and they are calling us with updates every 30 minutes.” or “yes our servers are in Ireland, but some of our best techies have gone and physically inspected them with the EY consultants and our DPO firm and it was completely GDPR compliant”, and all the other stuff you get to do when you make the companies billions.

That is interesting about Google support because a while back I had some issues with my Google home devices so I was browsing their help guides and a popup asked if I need to speak with technical support. One click and 30s later someone was one line and spent 30m fixing my device issue. Not bad for something I spend $100 on.

What’s this 1.2B loss you speak of? I don’t follow

"Add Rev" as in advertising revenue?

didn't Google announce a year or two ago that Cloud had 5 years to make a certain amount or it was gone?

no. that was a tabloid claim based on iffy data. Cloud's main products (compute, storage, databases, load balancers, etc) aren't going anywhere.

Does Google dogfood cloud? Or is it compartmentalized from internal service infra?

Both.

In reality almost all of Google is hosted on Borg. But I worked briefly on a project that was heavily interlinked between the two. I believe there's been more efforts to move things into GCP.

Afaik even “google cloud” itself runs atop Borg.

Where else would it run?

G runs lots of small things on cloud but a company that is willing to fund 0.1% global efficiency efforts is never going to sacrifice far larger efficiency regressions just for the aesthetic pleasure of dogfooding cloud for major services like websearch.

You can do some stuff on cloud; for example, for a few minor projects where we needed to make some web pages, we used GCP. However, it wasn't well integrated with internal, it was effectively just a web site like any other.

I believe there had been multiple waves of attempting to get people to move to cloud, but at the time, there was no coherent strategy to move large parts of the tech stack to cloud. Unfortunately with any sufficiently complex production service that runs in borg, untangling the web of dependencies is usually too hard.

Other things work great in the cloud; if I was a Google Researcher working on public data and publishing papers, I'd intentionally use Google Cloud (with access to VMs, CPUs, and GPUs, but not any internal data like the web page crawls) with Jax, Keras, TF, etc.

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