What fascinates me about Google is literally nothing else has stuck to the wall and they've thrown a LOT of rocks. Selling ads against search, the initial hit, still accounts for over 90% of their revenue.
Google doesn't break out their ad revenue numbers. Current estimates are that Youtube & Google Play ads contribute >15% of their ad revenue. I would argue that "ads against search" and "ads on Youtube" are two different businesses even if they do seem similar. Google is not a one trick pony: they have 5 billion dollar businesses: ads against search; ads against their web properties like Gmail, network ads (DoubleClick), ads on YouTube, Android.
Yes and no; if general faith in Internet advertising tumbles those businesses will all be affected.
And I do mean "yes and no". There are ways in which they are different, but there's also significant ways in which the performance is significantly correlated in a way that would concern me as a CEO.
You tube does not make much money according this article. If youtube was making money wouldn't google make a not of it in their 10k or 10q instead of not breaking it out.
This is a good point. They're driven by advertising revenue (primary revenue) and collecting market data (to better target advertising, making them a good option for buyers of advertising). Social networks, chat, flight data, search, video watching (youtube), aggregated shopping data, all allow them to deliver advertising or collect data on users.
Looking at the services that have been killed over the years or stagnated, they don't allow enough data collection or ad delivery to justify spending money by Google. Either because they simply weren't well geared towards it, or because they didn't get enough uptake in the market.
Yea, but that itself is a very big deal. Along the way they made, browser, mobile OS, programing language, all highly successful. Their cutting edge ad platform which Yahoo despite being much longer in business and multiple tries could not beat.