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Comment by forgotpwtomain | Hacker News Reader

I tend to disagree that Google is similar to Yahoo in 2000. If you look at Yahoo in retrospect, portal to the rest of the web is pretty banal. Google has a lot of core things going for it which are no longer the search-market: Android (and store), Google Maps, Youtube, Cloud Business, Office Suite, research into self-driving vehicles, that should make it more comparable to Microsoft than Yahoo.

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> Google has a lot of core things going for it which are no longer the search-market

Google still makes most (~90%) of its revenue from search.

All the other products need to be[come] succusful for them to be considered alternatives for revenue.

> Google still makes most (~90%) of its revenue from search.

No, it makes about that much from advertising, but "Google websites" -- mostly, but not only, search -- are only 71.3% of Google revenue.

Alphabet's 1Q 2016 10-Q: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204416...

They don't break it down, but I am guess profit margin for search is much higher than things like youtube since with youtube they need to send some money to copyright holders. I wonder how profitable it is? If it was super profitable they would be breaking it down. When AWS started doing well Amazon broke down how much AWS was making.

Maybe those other products are there to make sure that search stays relevant?

Except for Android, which is facing legal challenges across the globe, advertising remains pretty much their sole profit channel. While Google may exist in many product areas, they need to find a new source of actual revenue.

Don't forget about Google Apps, Vault, and Google Cloud. Google Apps for Business with Vault costs my employer over 18 million dollars a year and my department has a five figure monthly Google Cloud budget.

They're definitely trying here, but from my understanding, Google Cloud Platform is a distant third to Amazon and Microsoft's clouds, and the revenue total barely is worth mention in Google's earnings calls.

> and the revenue total barely is worth mention in Google's earnings calls.

"Barely worth mentioning" because they don't even break out the $2 billion in quarterly revenue from non-advertising sources beyond "non-advertising sources" in financial reports, but in the most recent, the $400+ million increase in quarterly revenue in that category was primarily attributed to two sources -- increases in Play store revenue, and increases in "revenues from cloud and apps offerings for enterprise".

Its just hard for anything else to seem significant against the background of $18 billion in quarterly advertising revenue.

> While Google may exist in many product areas, they need to find a new source of actual revenue.

I suspect the fact they make so much revenue from advertising has actually blown tepid at the efforts to seek revenue elsewhere (e.g. is Youtube even profitable? Google Docs?).

> I suspect the fact they make so much revenue from advertising has actually blown tepid at the efforts to seek revenue elsewhere

I'm not sure it has -- I think (certainly this is true of the most recent quarter, but I think its a longer term trend) non-advertising revenue is growing at a faster rate (% increase/unit time) than advertising revenue. Its just that the fact that advertising revenue is so much bigger to start with makes the increase in non-advertising revenue seem insignificant in relation to overall revenue.

If you are setting up a company, one check to Google can be your IT department, and people already know the tools. That's a pretty good potential revenue stream.

"Advertising" is a pretty big bucket, and it seems a safe assumption that there's always going to be a lot of money in advertising. The problem is that where advertising dollars go changes, just ask the newspapers.

They have (at least) 4 large sources of ad revenue: search, adwords, mobile & youtube. If one dries up, the others may grow to compensate.

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