back to article That YouTube ad boycott had square-root of sod-all effect on Google's insane cash machine

Google's parent company Alphabet has enjoyed a bumper start to the year, raking in more and more ad cash, sinking dosh into hobby projects, and generally having a great time. You can hate on the cloud monster all you like, but life is good in the Googleplex at the moment. For the three months to March 31, its first quarter of …

  1. AndyS

    So, earnings per share were $7.73, which is a pretty solid number.

    But then at the end of the article it turns out shares cost $909... So, a return on investment of 0.85%.

    A more reasonable 3% roi would value the shares at around $250.

    What is going on there then? Is this just the normal massive over valuation of tech companies? Is Google just seen as a safe place to park money and forget it exists?

    1. John Tappin

      Arguably should have a stock split

      I.e. swapping one share for 4 - putting them into that $250 range.

      This is however an expensive and complex exercise - and usually shareholder driven, which apparently is not a concern to Google shareholders.

    2. Charlie Clark Silver badge

      Not really. ROI for shares is a combination of dividend and rise in share price: until recently Apple famously didn't give a dividend and Amazon still doesn't (has really shitty EPS). Some investors prefer one, some prefer the other largely down to cashflow requirements and tax treatment: dividends are treated as income, divestments as capital gains.

      Don't have the graph handy but I think you'll find that Google's share price has consistently been on the rise. Some kind of share split (at least 10:1) followed by a buyback is probably on the cards as a result.

    3. Tebbers

      That earnings per share is per quarter, so multiply it by 4 to get the annual earnings per share (assuming no growth), giving you a ROI of 3.4%.

  2. Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

    Yikes Scooby...

    That damn Circle keeps expanding!!!

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It helps us enforce

    We help AI enforce us

    AI enforces us to help it

  4. handleoclast

    Other factors increasing profits...

    One thing they didn't mention has an upon profitability.

    Youtube screwed content creators. Bigly (as an orange fucktard would say). Demonetized many existing videos from some creators. Which led to many creators I watch quickly putting up videos begging people to support them on patreon or the amount of content they could produce would go down. They weren't using it as an excuse to get extra money. Several of them had given up jobs to produce content full time, living on youtube advertising revenue. They were fucked.

    One guy (you probably know who I mean whether you love him or hate him buys scientific kit in order to make educational (ish) videos. He's long been with patreon and is buying serious kit like extra high speed cameras to film stuff in extra slow-mo, but decreased youtube revenue still affected him. Why would his videos be demonetized? Well, he also criticises creationists and SJWs, so there are a lot of complaints.

    I have yet to see any of them saying youtube has remonetized any of their videos. So youtube wins bigly. People are still creating content (if they can get enough support via patreon) and youtube aren't paying them as much for doing it.

    Of course, most of the content I watch can be labelled contentious. It promotes atheism or promotes science (or both), either of which alone tends to upset the US Talebangelicals. I expect the oh-so-tedious "look at me teaching you how to apply make-up", "look at my inane life" and "look at my 'pranks' that are hilarious if you're on serious amounts of recreational pharmaceuticals but fucking twuntish if not" content producers haven't suffered to the same extent, so maybe youtube's savings by demonetizing videos aren't that great.

    At least Google aren't as bad as Microsoft. Yet.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Most of the paid for adverts never get seen by real people

    Marketing - you are stupid and wasting your money.

    Keep feeding the billion-dollar tax-avoiding cash-cow however - it's not like it's your own money.

  6. Shades
    Paris Hilton

    Adverts?

    YouTube has adverts? Since when?

    1. P. Lee

      Re: Adverts?

      >YouTube has adverts? Since when?

      I leave the adverts running on channels I want to support. Generally on mute in the background though and what I'm watching generally runs from 40 minutes upwards so it is a relatively short amount of time.

  7. William 3 Bronze badge

    The "boycott" itself was an advert

    You think the ad men in the big corps wouldn't jump at the chance to virtue signal how pious their corps are (whilst exploiting workers/natural resources) that they would never be associated with "speech" they dislike (third world sweatshops via a contractor not withstanding) and that it wasn't simply a chance to garner free advertising by getting their company in the news?

    You've never worked in the advertising industry have you. You think the guys selling you the "dream" are Men of Morals?

    Ha ha ha ha.

    Brilliant.

  8. my fingers stuck

    google cash cow.... time to be slaughtered

    there is only 1 way to make these greedy badtards stand up and oay attention...DO NOT CLICK ON ANY AD LINK.. job done

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