Those projects brought in $185 million for the company during the second quarter, up from $74 million in the second quarter of 2015.
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Strong gains in the red-hot video market also drove the company’s growth in the quarter, Google Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai said during a call with investors.
Those mounting losses may put a dent in Alphabet’s pitch to Wall Street that it can be more responsible with its spending. Others would like to see Alphabet get more down-to-earth, and commercialize its projects more, like it did with Google Fiber.
Baidu Inc (ADR) (NASDAQ:BIDU) dropped $0.63 to $165.00 in after-hours trading after it reported fiscal-second quarter earnings.
Alphabet’s profit rose to $4.9 billion, or $7 a share for class A and B common stock, up from $3.9 billion, or $4.93 a share, in the prior year.
Revenue increased 21 percent to $21.5 billion, the California tech giant said, in results that topped most analyst forecasts.
Revenue, fueled by Google’s advertising business, rose 21% to $21.5 billion in the second quarter from a year ago, beating analysts’ average estimate of $20.76 billion. Google has traditionally been dependent on desktop searches for powering its advertising revenues, but the shift towards mobiles has finally paid off.
In recent years, Google has been pouring money into new divisions, new investments, and new acquisitions, ostensibly all of which are created to help the company suss out new ways to make money that aren’t tied to search and advertising. Other drivers of ad revenue growth during the quarter were YouTube’s TrueView opt-in video ads, along with DoubleClick’s programmatic ads. Last year, Other Bets lost $3.6 billion – exceeding the annual revenue of many companies.
Pichai also hinted at the future direction for Google, saying that while today, “mobile is the engine that drives us”, the company is looking to machine learning for future growth. Ad clicks increase was the whopping 29%, and a lot of that came from mobile phones, plus the price of mobile ads is beginning to rise, too.
“Let me again emphasize that the majority of these efforts are prerevenue, we continue to invest across these opportunities, and are doing so in a disciplined way”, Alphabet’s CFO, Ruth Porat, said in an earnings call.
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Meanwhile Amazon.com reported a better-than-expected rise in quarterly revenue, powered by growth in its cloud services unit and an increase in subscriptions for its Prime loyalty programme. Advertising accounted for US$19.1 billion in revenue.
