Google's sales boom even after culture backlash – CNET


Tech Industry

Google’s sales boom even after culture backlash

The world’s biggest search engine has been called out for diversity fails — and its inability to police content on YouTube. But it’s still raking it in.

google-hq-sede-mountain-view.jpg

Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced the company’s financial results on Thursday.

James Martin/CNET

Google has been dealing with serious questions about its culture and diversity, but there’s one thing it doesn’t don’t have to worry about: sales.

Alphabet, Google’s parent company led by co-founder Larry Page, on Thursday announced financial results for the last three months of the year. Alphabet tallied $32.32 billion in sales, beating Wall Street estimates of $31.85 billion. Excluding taxes and other expenses, profit was $9.70 per share. Analysts expected $9.96 per share. With taxes factored in, the company reported a loss of $4.35 per share, indicating it brought revenue in from overseas.

To be clear, Google, the largest and only profitable division of Alphabet, is made up of the company’s search and internet businesses, like YouTube and Gmail. It makes most of its money on ads, which account for about 85 percent of sales.

Its more experimental projects, called “other bets” in Google parlance, include the self-driving car unit Waymo and the health and biotech company Verily. Those types of projects are losing less money than they used to. In the fourth quarter, they lost $916 million, versus $1.09 billion over the same period last year.

“Our business is driving great growth,” Ruth Porat, Alphabet’s CFO, said in a statement. “We continue to make substantial investments for the long-term in exciting new businesses.”

The company’s stock fell nearly 5 percent in after-hours trading. 

Separately, the company said John L. Hennessy has been appointed chairman of the board of directors. Formerly the president of Stanford University, Hennessy has been a member of Google’s board since 2004. 

Alphabet’s earnings announcement comes as Page and Pichai, CEO of Google, grapple with questions about diversity and culture. In August, Google engineer James Damore made national headlines for a 3,300-word memo he wrote challenging the way the company thinks about diversity. Damore argued that a gender gap exists not necessarily because of sexism, but in part because of “biological” differences between men and women. Days after the memo went viral, Pichai fired Damore.

The controversy isn’t going away. In January month, Damore filed a lawsuit against his former company, alleging Google discriminates against white men and conservatives. Meanwhile, the US Department of Labor is probing Google for allegations of gender pay discrimination. (Google’s workforce is 69 percent male and 31 percent female.)

Meanwhile, YouTube, which Google owns, is also in the hot seat. Logan Paul, a YouTube star whose channel has over 15 million followers, posted a video on New Year’s Eve from a forest in Japan that showed the body of someone who’d committed suicide. YouTube eventually decided to cut business ties with Paul, ousting him from YouTube’s premium advertisement lineup, Google Preferred. The episode highlighted how much YouTube, the biggest online video site in the world, struggles with policing a platform that boasts more than a billion users a month.

YouTube has also been under fire after the filters for YouTube Kids, the version of the site designed for younger audiences, failed to recognize or pull down some videos that feature disturbing images aimed at children — like Mickey Mouse lying in a pool of blood or a claymation version of Spider-Man urinating on Elsa, the Disney princess from “Frozen.” Videos featuring children doing innocuous activities like exercising are also riddled with predatory or sexual comments from viewers.

A few weeks later, the company outlined new rules to make YouTube safer for kids. They included using machine learning and automated tools to identify inappropriate videos, as well as doubling the number of human reviewers to police the content. Some critics, though, felt the new rules don’t go far enough.

The Smartest Stuff: Innovators are thinking up new ways to make you, and the things around you, smarter.

Special Reports: CNET’s in-depth features in one place.

All Rights Reserved.
Affiliate Disclosure
CNET may earn fees when you click through to a partner site.
Top Brands



Source link

Share

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *