Alphabet’s earnings name was yesterday, and as regular, the corporate took in some huge cash ($86.31 billion), thanks principally to advert click-through charges being at a sure degree. Extra fascinating, although, are the product numbers tucked away within the report.
For the excellent news, a giant announcement was the success of certainly one of Google’s greatest subscription plans, Google One, which CEO Sundar Pichai mentioned is “nearly to cross 100 million subscribers.” Google One is generally a cloud-storage plan for Google accounts, permitting customers to pay a month-to-month price to get greater than the 15GB of Drive and Gmail storage that comes free with a Google account. Pichai says the corporate’s complete subscription enterprise—which goes to be Google One (storage), Google Workspace (enterprise accounts), YouTube Premium (ad-free YouTube), and YouTube TV (a cable TV different)—are as much as $5 billion in annual income. That is up fivefold since 2019.
Talking of subscriptions, certainly one of Google’s costliest, the $350-a-year NFL Sunday Ticket, did not have any onerous numbers related to it. Google SVP and CBO Philipp Schindler mentioned the corporate was “happy with the NFL Sunday Ticket signups in our first season.” Sunday Ticket was at all times a money-loser for DirecTV, and that was earlier than the worth shot up half a billion within the streaming period. Google is now reportedly on the hook to pay the NFL $2 billion a yr for the subsequent seven years. When requested a couple of return on funding for the undertaking, Schindler solely cited “stable” advertiser curiosity and that “NFL Sunday Ticket helps our long-term technique and actually helps solidify YouTube’s place as a must have app on everybody’s TV set.”
The yr 2023 was additionally the primary time Google Cloud recorded a revenue. Cloud is Google’s try to compete with Amazon Internet Companies as a platform for the cloud-based infrastructure wants of builders. After years of funding and development, Cloud made $864 million in This fall 2023. It misplaced $186 million over the identical interval in 2022. In keeping with a current Canalys report, Google Cloud’s market share is in a distant third (10 p.c) behind Microsoft Azure (25 p.c) and the chief, AWS (31 p.c).
For some time, Cloud’s third-place place might at the very least be offset by stronger development than its opponents, however that Canalys report now has Microsoft with the very best development price, because of curiosity in its AI options. Microsoft is partnered with OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT. Pichai spent loads of time speaking about Google Cloud’s competing AI work, however OpenAI has a degree of hype and curiosity that may’t be matched by Google’s Bard/Gemini speak.
I do not assume we ever obtained a transparent quantity for precisely how many individuals Google laid off in 2023. The corporate introduced 12,000 layoffs in January, saying US workers had “already” been notified, whereas worldwide worker layoffs would “take longer because of native legal guidelines and practices.” The corporate then laid off numerous workers throughout divisions all year long. Regardless of the closing cuts ended up being, the general headcount solely modified from 190,234 in December 2022 to 182,502 on the finish of 2023, a web lack of about 8,000 individuals. Google was nonetheless hiring so much throughout these layoffs.
100 eighty-two thousand workers remains to be so much. Google’s headcount on the finish of 2021 was 156,000 workers, and some Wall Avenue buyers wish to see the corporate return to that quantity. Pichai advised workers to brace for extra layoffs “all year long,” although the CEO says they would not be on the scale of 2023. Google’s downsizing price some huge cash, with the corporate spending $2.1 billion on worker severance and $1.8 billion on workplace house exit fees for 2023.
Itemizing picture by Getty Photographs | Alexander Koerner