Google closed this year's first quarter with a 12 percent bump in revenue, which is up to $17.3 billion, a figure that falls short of analyst expectations.
Net revenue for the world's biggest search company in the quarter that ended on March 31 is $13.9 billion, up from last year's net revenue of $12.2 billion. Wall Street expected net revenue of $14.4 billion, says Bloomberg. Net income is $3.6 billion, or $5.20 a share, up from last year's $3.5 billion, or $5.04 a share. Google, which earns half its advertising income in overseas markets, cites the strengthening dollar as a reason for its dwindling revenue.
"If these currency trends persist, foreign exchange headwinds would obviously continue to impact our results in 2015," says Patrick Pichette, Google's outgoing chief financial officer.
But investors are more concerned about Google's decreasing advertising rates more than about foreign exchange trends. For the sixth time in three years, Google missed expectations of Wall Street, which for the past few years have questioned whether Google can maintain its dominance in advertising as users go increasingly mobile, where rivals such as Facebook have a bigger slice of the pie, than on desktop.
Although global aggregate paid clicks went up by 13 percent year-over-year, Google's cost-per-click (CPC), or the amount of money paid by advertisers each time a user clicks an ad, is down by 7 percent.
However, Pichette is quick to allay investors' fears that Google cannot play the same game on mobile as on desktop, where the search engine built its now aging online empire. Pichette says claims that the difficulties in monetizing mobile ads are driving down Google's revenue are unfounded, and that Google's strength in mobile is the main factor behind the company's continuing, albeit slowing, growth.
Instead, Google's finance chief says YouTube's TrueView ads are the culprit. Although YouTube is the biggest video platform on the web, Google has struggled trying to monetize it without turning off users with ads they cannot skip. With YouTube's TrueView ads, users can skip the ads they don't want to see and advertisers only pay for actual ad views.
Pichette says YouTube viewership continues to rise, and so does viewership of TrueView ads. However, YouTube does not monetize as well as Google's other businesses, says Pichette, although Google does not provide details of the video platform's financial performance.
"TrueView ads currently monetize at lower rates than ad clicks on Google.com, but as you know, video ads generally reach people earlier in the purchase funnel and so across the industry, they tend to have a very different pricing profile than they would have on a typical performance search ad," Pichette explains. "Excluding the impact of YouTube TrueView ads, growth in site clicks would be lower, but still positive, and our CPCs would be healthy and growing year-over-year."
Photo: Anthony Quintano | Flickr
