[alangibson]

I'm long GOOG (horizon of 3 years) as 1) their current profits are stratospheric and growing 2) the companies that make money off of AI will already have a strong cloud offering. My thesis is that B2B is where the money is at. B2C is trash unless you can insert ads. B2C subscriptions for something like search isn't even with talking about.

Monetization of AI hasn't even really started yet so I could be tragically wrong. It'll be an interesting ride no matter what.

[hedora]

I asked Kagi search's LLM if cloud could make up for their consumer business tanking, and it pointed out (summarizing, it wrote a half page report with references) their cloud division is only 20% of their current revenue, it lost $5.6B on $13B of revenue in 2021, and that its growth is slowing.

For the same query ("assuming they lose search and advertising google cloud revenue likely to make up the difference in revenue?"), google responded with the following top hit:

> Simply Wall Street - Jul 16, 2023 — I assume that Google's Cloud revenue will grow at 18.5% for the next 5 years, in line with expectations of the industry's growth rate.

Long GOOG (3 years) might make sense though. Word in the valley is they're trying to increase margins by driving costs down. That should improve their multiplier even as they retreat from core markets and their revenue drops.

[edit: I summarized what it said wrong. Ad revenue is 80%. Everything else (including Android licensing and hardware sales) is 20%. It didn't give a percentage for cloud revenue.]

[russelg]

Search subscription seems to be working quite well for Kagi. Source: I use it, and I like it. If you search HN for Kagi you'll find a lot of discourse about it.

[alangibson]

I use Kagi too. Buy there's just no universe where selling subscriptions to search is going to generate FAANG level revenues.