Google’s second-quarter revenue from its search advertisements beat expectations, enabling parent company Alphabet to report revenues in line with market forecasts.
Alphabet’s overall revenue from Google advertising rose, from $50.44 to $56.29 billion, an increase of 11.6 percent.
Of the $69.69 billion in total revenue reported by Alphabet, 81 percent came from Google’s ad business. This was also in line with market expectations of $69.88 billion, according to data by Refinitiv.
Alphabet executives had warned that Google was not immune to the economic pullback. However, Google search ads are said to be better positioned to weather the uncertain market because they tend to be less expensive for ad buyers.
In addition, search ads are directed at people searching for a specific term, producing better results and adding to the incentive to publish ads via Google search. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai attributed the company’s second-quarter performance to be driven by “Search and Cloud.”
Online Ad Sector
The Google Search ad results came following a spate of dismal performance by other tech companies offering online advertising.Snap Inc., the developer of Snapchat, for example, reported only a 13 percent increase in revenue for the second quarter, the slowest growth rate in the company’s history. Net loss was reported at $422.1 million, a massive jump from the $151.7 million net loss reported a year back.
In a call with analysts, Jeremi Gorman, Snap’s chief business officer, said that digital ad spending is “definitely easier to turn off.” In an economic slowdown, digital companies tend to be the first to suffer negative effects because customers can easily switch off spending. Other ad channels like TV commercials are much harder to scale down or cancel immediately.