[matwood]

Google revenues come from ~90% ads. It's an ad company.

The company gives guidance, so the estimates are not pulled out of thin air. Google should know their ad business very well at this point.

People selling after an ad miss is medium/long term thinking. They could be wrong, but was the miss caused by a wider economic slowdown (see UPS earnings) or was it Google specific? Either way, it could be sign of Google slowing down or the economy as whole.

[jsnell]

> Google revenues come from ~90% ads.

That's not true, and hasn't been for a decade. For this earnings release, the proportion of revenue from ads was 76%.

> The company gives guidance

No, they don't. As far as I know they've literally never given guidance.

[matwood]

Ok, I divided the search revenue into the revenue number above, but it’s missing TAC. 76% is still the vast majority of revenue.

[jsnell]

TAC shouldn't be part of that computation. It's an expense, not revenue. (Yes, it's confusing that it's in the same table as the revenue numbers, but so is the headcount and you wouldn't try to work it into the equation somehow.)

Also, if you only consider the search revenue you'll err in the opposite direction. It's 55% of their revenue, so pretty soon not even a normal majority. You should look at the "Google Advertising" line.

[matwood]

Thank you!

[westhanover]

What do you think the covering analysts talk to google executives about? The weather?

[jsnell]

From your misplaced sarcasm, it seems that you might not know what "guidance" means in this context. It's the company predicting what their financials will be in the future, such as "our revenue will be in the range $X-$Y in the next quarter". There's a lot of space for discussion between those kinds of predictions and the weather. For example, they could discuss what happened in the previous quarter. They could discuss future plans, without making any exact claims on the impact of those plans.

If you truly believe Google releases guidance, how about you just find a quote for what that supposed guidance was for Q4? You won't find it, because Google does not release guidance. The GP just made it up, just like they made up the numbers.

[cityguy33]

Yet when we beat expectations in ads but barely miss in cloud the stock tanks as well. There’s no reasonable explanation I’ve heard for our stock behavior after our earnings beat expectations.