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Is Google Ads and Youtube not profitable?

Technically, Google Ads is making all the money. Google search and YouTube are more or less just funnels for Google Ads. I'm not sure how Alphabet has everything setup and if Google Ads revenue that originates from search is booked to the search division, but in reality, everything is just ways for you to look at Google Ads.

I don't buy this argument. Google Search and YouTube are highly separable. There is some synergy between the two, but really no more than between any two ad-driven sites on the Internet.

Yeah, of course. At the scale of Google's main products, they could build unique ads platforms and keep everything completely seperate if they wanted to, needed to or were forced to.

Alphabet would like get separated into independent companies.

They might already be tracking their profitability that way to encourage search to include more ads "organically" (as in by tying search performance to ads in search revenue that team will be interested in improving ads in search revenue)

This doesn't even mean Google Search doesn't use Google Ads. It just means that Google Search has to buy usage of Google Ads thereby allowing competition between ad providers.

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