Stefan Mileschin

eople interested in searching for coranavirus rather than buying stuff

Alphabet beat what the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street predicted for its quarterly revenue as its Google unit posted double-digit advertising growth despite the economic slowdown from the novel coronavirus.


But Alphabet Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat told analysts on Tuesday that while users were searching more, they were looking up less commercial topics and advertisers were cutting spending.

“As of today, we anticipate the second quarter will be a difficult one for our advertising business”, Porat said.

Porat said search ad revenue had declined by a “mid-teens percentage” by the end of March compared with a year earlier.

Alphabet’s overall revenue in the first quarter was $41.2 billion, up 13 percent compared with the same period last year. Analysts expected $40.29 billion, up 10.87 percent, expecting the slowest growth since 11.1 percent in the second quarter of 2015.

While Google tools including Duo video chatting and YouTube have become essential to many users this year, the company largely does not charge for them and instead generates revenue selling ad tools as well as links, banners and commercials on its services and those of partners.

But more than 26 million people have filed for unemployment during the last month in United States, Google’s largest market for ad sales, erasing all of the country’s job gains in the last decade. Google’s ads business generated about 83 per cent of Alphabet’s revenue last year. It tends to flow with the broader economy, which explains Alphabet’s slower revenue growth in the first quarter.

Google ad sales were $33.8 billion, up about 10 percent from last year’s first quarter.

https://fudzilla.com/news/50737-alph...-trouble-ahead