Snap ‘s struggles in the advertising market did not bode well for industry heavyweights like Google. This was confirmed at the end of the fourth quarter, when the Mountain View company saw its advertising revenue decline by 3.6% to $59 billion over the last three months of 2022. For YouTube, the decline was even more pronounced, with revenue of less than $8 billion (-7.8%) in the last quarter of 2022, compared to $8.6 billion over the same period a year earlier.
In the face of these advertising setbacks
Google’s revenues rose very slightly between October and December, to $76 billion. Profits, on the truemoney database hand, collapsed, falling from $20.6 billion to $13.6 billion. The situation is hardly any brighter when it comes to operating profit, a barometer of the company’s profitability, which rose to $18.2 billion compared to $21.9 billion in the fourth quarter of 2021. To make matters worse, the cloud division fell short of market expectations, with revenue of $7.3 billion.
Layoffs and the US government’s crusade
Dominated by Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the cloud, and jostled by TikTok and Netflix on YouTube, Google is at a crossroads and will 17 best wordpress themes for cleaning services in 2023 to quickly find new revenue streams to take advantage of a breath of growth. To trim its margins, the Alphabet subsidiary, like most other Gafam (companies), is pulling the plug on projects deemed too unprofitable, like Area 120, the internal incubator that contributed to the growth of Gmail and Google News. And after asking its employees to increase their productivity last year, the company led by Sundar Pichai has decided to lay off 12,000 employees, or 6% of its global workforce.
In addition to its slowing growth
Google sees other threatening clouds, notably coming from the American authorities. While complaints have been piling up tw list parent company Alphabet for several years, the American government raised its voice again at the beginning of this year by suing the group, alongside eight states, including California and New York, to put an end to its anti-competitive dominance in the online advertising market. The threat hanging over Google is not insignificant, since the plaintiffs want to force the firm to simply dismantle its advertising business, which still represents nearly 80% of its revenue today.