Somewhat impressive that search share of revenue is 5% down, but search revenue is 12% up..
You basically have to say, everyone from the CEO/CFO, to the auditors, the financial analysts, the legal team, and all the way down are all lying and this random guy on Twitter is telling the truth. Sorry, not buying it.
And given all the replies to that post on Twitter, it sounds like it's true.
Yes I read the post (please refer to HN guidelines on asking if people read something) and didn't find anything worthwhile there which is why I mentioned what I did.
Posting here for others asking about lying/juicing since I'm rate limited.
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Lying on financial statements is in fact illegal. Juicing implies that some number is being misrepresented as higher than it otherwise would be which is a form of lying and thus would be illegal.
Obviously there are some gray areas - "we changed how we measure this" or something along those lines can be considered "juicing" or just a matter of changing a calculation to make more sense, but the broad accusation is extraordinary and requires much more evidence than some random person on Twitter saying some things. As an investor in Google (individually and through ETFs) it has no bearing on any investment thesis I have because I don't care what random nobodies on the Internet say and neither should you.
Him:
> campaigns we’ve been running for years with $1000 daily budget caps suddenly began spending $2000+ per day
Them:
> How it works: Google can spend up to twice your average daily budget on any single day to capture high-traffic or high-conversion moments.
Most people don't know this, but the Search Advertising auction is a black box. The advertiser just specifies a bid (the maximum they're willing to pay for a click); and the search engine promises that they will not pay more than that.
Here's a trick that Search Engines may (or may not, I plead the Fifth) use: the price an advertiser "i" who bid "bid_i" pays is bid_(i+1) * pctr_(i+1) / pctr_i where "pctr_(i+1)" is the predicted probability of click (pCTR) on the next lower ad; "pctr_i" is the predicted probability of click on the current ad.
Guess who calculates the pCTR? The Engine! In theory, if their pCTR calculations were 100% accurate, all advertisers would pay the minimum bid (which is typically $0.01)! Clearly, this is not desirable. So Engines juice the revenue by tweaking these pCTR values. Talk to anybody who works on auction mechanisms at a search engine, and you'll hear stories of how they tweaked these pCTR values.
Social media replies regularly confirm all kinds of nonsense.
Google has been sued for being a monopoly, and it's not because they're just really good. It's because there's basically no other market that hits any of the dollar costs.
advertisers decide which channel justifies.
They still bring 250B ads dollars to google search, meaning it provides more than 250B value to them,
I still believe large spenders already advertise on multiple channels and balance budgets based on performance.
That first price auction complain is bs, advertisers will just stop bidding $5 for top click and start bidding $1.1 in his example to hit their goals.
So (in theory) advertisers will lower their bids if they're not getting the desired value from the clicks; and over time some will migrate budgets to other channels (like "influencers"? shudder ...).
im very far from dentistry
What they’re doing now is just being a lot more overt about it, because they want to carve up their old cash cow to feed their AI ambitions before ChatGPT and Claude eat it up first.
Course, they win anyway because I also pay for youtube premium to avoid seeing ads..
Feels like the world is becoming a split between people who can afford not to be the product and people who cannot.
There would be less monopolies and software industry would consist of smaller competing companies trying to please customers.
Second sentence is empirically a complete lie.
Search volume is still growing, despite analysts asking on every call what Google is going to do about falling volume, and Google continuing to re-iterate: Search volume is still growing, as are clicks on ads.
I get it that everyone hates paying as much for clicks as they do now. You can hate it all you want. You can claim Google is lying about search volume and ads, but that would be massive securities fraud...
Haters gonna hate. It doesn't mean the king is dead.
I'm not a believer in Google search long term, but advertisers continue to pay because they still get value - even if Google increases prices.
I think the bigger concern is that earnings misses are very rare for GOOG, and historically they've been able to hit almost any target that Wall Street expects. Their past earnings misses were all related to major macroeconomic events (2020Q1, which was the COVID shutdowns, 2022 all year with inflation from COVID/Ukraine + rate hikes, and 2019Q3 with the taper tantrum from Fed rate hikes), and most of them were more in the 5% range. A 30% miss, particularly with slowing revenue growth in their core business despite almost full monetization of commercial queries, could indicate that the golden goose is disintegrating.
For that matter, GOOG has been extremely correlated with macroeconomic indicators since about 2018, which means investors in the rest of the stock market should probably watch out. It's likely we're already in recession but don't know it.
which exactly earning number missed by 30%?..
OI isn’t more “actual” than EPS. I remember back when Yahoo traded for less than cash and liquids [1] because investors didn’t trust management not to blow it on stupid shit.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/10/business/dealbook/how-to-...
that's not ground truth in environment when landscape (AI) dramatically changes every quarter, and investments are uncertain bets with huge win potential.
Your ground truth metrics are: 1. How healthy core business: operating income. 2. How aggressively company reinvest: net - operating income.
It's somewhat fake, as fake as last quarter's huge beat. It's basically due to their large share in SpaceX, which they have to mark to market at the end of the quarter. Anyway, that's not at all the reason for the freakout.