Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by acchow | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

acchow

2008 hit the economy hard, but Google still managed to grow revenue by 31% (year ended Dec 31 2008)

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312509...

2009 was tougher, where revenue growth slowed to 8.5%

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312510...

This all while unemployment rocketed upwards

View on HN

You're skipping the part where Google grew because they were opening new channels for growth - YouTube was only a few years old and growing, in 2008 Android had just been released and DoubleClick had just been bought. Now their growth depends on extracting more from their advertisers, it's an apples-to-oranges comparison.

We haven't really seen a Dotcom 2.0 and I think we're due for it. COVID-era pumped a sizable amount of money into Big Tech.

> because they were opening new channels for growth

As they are today with GCP, security, user assurance, and everything under Alphabet not labeled Google.

Yes, ad makes up a huge %age of revenue for Aplhabet, but it’s not the only dish at the buffet.

Last quarter Google and Meta ad revenue growth was roughly 2% and -4% respectively. If overall ad spend declines both of them will loose money.

2008/9 are not a good comparison because they were smaller companies and so much ad spend was moving from offline to online.

If google lost 40% of their revenue it would only kick them back to the same numbers they had in 2019 and 2020.

Maybe Meta would have to stop spending a fortune on VR if revenue declines, but it would take a lot to hurt them.

They've increased headcount significantly since 2019 so I imagine layoffs would be in the picture. Agree they'd still be large businesses with growth prospects.

To be clear, I mean that Alphabet revenue was about the same in both 2019 and 2020, so it's only growth since Q3 2020 that matters.

Any idea what the new headcount is doing? I can think of very little change in their services over the last handful of years, but apparently they have doubled in size in the last five! At best I could point at waymo, but they've gained 2k compared to 70k. And they already gutted stadia but that was never very big.

My impression is that a lot of it goes to GCP. Maybe YouTube getting a push in whatever initiative prompts them to overpay for NFL Sunday Ticket. I'd love to see a leaked doc from some mega cap tech outlining headcount per segment. I don't get it either.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com