Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jacques_chester 5168 days ago
Google is actually not diversified at all. Out of $38 billion of revenue earned in 2011, $36.5 billion came from advertising[1].

[1] http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html -- compare "Revenues" to "Total Advertising Revenues".

3 comments

Rather than revenue diversification, I was thinking more about product diversification. With core products like GMail, search, Plus (hah), and Google Apps, if any one of those takes a catastrophic plummet in traffic, their revenue wouldn't crash completely. In their early days, if a competitor took over search, they would have no remaining products that continued to generate revenue.
Because Google is an advertising company (so is Facebook). It shouldn't be a surprise that advertising is their main source of income. But at least you can point to a multitude of products within which Google places ads, as well as devices and software to provide places to put ads. Facebook, not so much. Yet?
Get back to /r/weightroom!
DYEHN?