Google’s ad revenue has dropped again for a second straight quarter, with parent company Google posting $54.5 billion (AU$82.2 billion) in ad revenue for the first three months of this year.
The drop, however, was less than one per cent compared to the same period last year.
“We did see some signs of stabilization in ad spend,” said Google’s chief financial officer Ruth Porat said during an earnings call, referring to YouTube, which saw a third-straight drop in quarterly ad revenue from US$6.87 billion to US$6.69 billion (AU$10.36 billion to AU$10.09 billion).
The company’s Philipp Schindler said that the company’s advertising, “Search” and “Other” revenues grew two per cent year-on-year, in an example of some convenient financial bundling. However, he also added that the increase largely came from the travel and retail verticals but decreases in the finance, media and entertainment verticals had dampened the growth.
Google’s “Other” revenue, specifically, saw a nine per cent growth, led mainly by “strong growth” in Youtube subscriptions, according to Schindler.
The company was quick to ad that AI, retail and YouTube would be able to drive growth in advertising revenues going forward. AI would help businesses target users more accurately, and improve relevance and performance with keywords, while it would also improve its smart bidding functions and boost creativity.
Still, it was not all bad. “Resilience in Search and momentum in Cloud resulted in Q1
consolidated revenues of $69.8 billion, up 3 per cent year-over-year, or up six per cent in constant currency,” said Porat.
Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai also said that the firm’s experiments in AI would bring new opportunities for the company’s search and ads platforms and would boost incremental conversion opportunities.
