Special report: Good morning from a rainy and bustling Paris, and a quick update on Google’s latest financials.
Alphabet’s latest numbers had investors cooing. Another 14 per cent QOQ growth. Revenue topping US$1 billion a day. Enough for a Porsche Targa every 14 seconds.
Break-up! Whatevs… who cares, right?
I hear this a lot. Publishers routinely remind me that Google’s doing just great, with cash pouring into its vaults, and that’s true.
For now.
In just a few weeks, Judge Amit Mehta delivers his ruling on how Google should be dealt with for its illegal monopoly on search.
Hot on his heels will be a decision from Judge Leonie Brinkema on how Google’s monopoly of ads must be busted.
The likelihood is that this will be the last earnings report ever for Google before the break-up rulings are in, so it’s wise to view it through that lens.
Most financial coverage today has focused on the topline numbers.
Revenue up 14 per cent to $96.4 billion.
Search revenue up 5.9 per cent.
YouTube up 6.5 per cent.
Impressive indeed, but it’s the numbers deeper in the financial reports that tell the true story and expose why Google hyperscaling growth is being halted by regulators.
What publishers need to know
The number you need to watch is Network Revenue. This is the money that Google passes to third parties across the open web, which includes nine in 10 publishers.
This is AdX. This is Google Ad Manager. And these two are the lifeblood of the open web, and Google is sucking it dry.
This chart shows how much Google has passed down this pipe to support the open web over the past few years. So far, 2025 is flat, but it will go down again shortly.
This is what it looks like quarter on quarter. Note the dotted trendline…
This is what it looks like year on year.
So, Google can play jazz hands all it likes and show its overall growth and seek to delight its shareholders.
And make astonishing motherhood claims like this from CEO Sundar Pichai today: “We are leading at the frontier of AI. AI is positively impacting every part of the business.”
That’s about as accurate an AI Overviews answer trained on Reddit. The truth is that it’s losing ground to almost every other AI rival and its efforts have been dreadful.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT is now closing in on 15 per cent of Google’s search volume - making it a far bigger threat than Microsoft’s Bing achieved in 16 years.
He’ll be gone soon.
No, Google is in its death throes, funnelling cash to the bits of the business it owns. It’s threading a needle. Sucking cash from search before it ends, and to YouTube.
Note: YouTube is likely to be subject of another antitrust break-up soon too.
For publishers who are now preparing for Google Zero - when they get no traffic from search - they should add zero ad revenue to that too.
And here’s another funny thing I spotted. Google recently changed its logo from this, to this.
Do a quick Google search on when other failing tech companies changed their logos and you’ll find many have reworked their logos in times of hardship.
And the names? Xerox, Blackberry and Nokia.
Final word to The New York Times.
Google has immense strengths, very deep pockets and universal brand awareness. It can afford to hire all the AI stars it needs.
Still, the history of tech is full of onetime powerhouses, like the mobile device maker BlackBerry and the social media site MySpace, that failed to anticipate the future.
Google is not exempt.
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