A topic, not touched on too much, was brought up on DigitalPoint.
How do we all see the future of Google? We’ve got a company that makes 99% of its revenue from one source of income - ads.
With MSN and Yahoo moving in, as well as many other contextual advertising companies, do you think this will deal a blow to Google?
An interested point, I think. As it’s true, Google does generate — all? — their revenue through AdSense. Thinking about it, Google offers all their services for free. Google Maps, Froogle, GMail, Google Search/Local, and plenty of other services; all these services are being offered for free to the community. Google Stock and Google AdSense is really the only place revenue is directly generated from. Google needs to come out with another source of income because depending so heavily upon, well, basically just AdSense, might be a weakness for the company and they may really need to step it up so they can become a bigger player in the game. While Google is already ahead in the search industry, Google is still behind on software. Microsoft takes the leader on software, but their MSN Search is still falling behind Google’s.
July 25th, 2006 at 7:25 am
Google only generates 41% of their revenue through AdSense: “Google Network Revenues - Google’s partner sites generated revenues, through AdSense programs, of $997 million, or 41% of total revenues.”
But 58% through their own site and sites they own: “Google Sites Revenues - Google-owned sites generated revenues of $1.43 billion, or 58% of total revenues.”
http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/revenues_q206.html
July 26th, 2006 at 3:54 pm
Thanks for bringing that up Derek. That’s a good point. There is a lot that goes on behind the scenes — away from AdSense/AdWords — that we don’t see. I still think Google needs to find alternate sources of revenue. It’s touch to depend 30% of total net profits on advertising.