Alphabet Google Ad Revenue Up 10% Again, Hitting $72.5 Billion

Google / Alphabet reported its Q4 2024 earnings last night, where its ad revenue hit $72.46 billion, up 10.6% from last year's quarter of $65.52 billion. Google's revenue was up 12% with $96.47 billion and its profit was up 30.7% to $30.9B. Search revenue specifically was up 12.5% to $54 billion.

Last quarter, Google hit its highest ad revenue ever, and again, beat that record by a lot. It was up about 10% from last quarter, in terms of ad revenue.

Meanwhile, Google's stock was down as much as 9% in after hours trading.

I focus my write ups on Google Search and its ad revenues, and less about the other bets, since this is a search focused blog. The cloud sales were a bit disappointment, leading to most of the downtrend in the stock - I believe.

Sundar Pichai, CEO, said: “Q4 was a strong quarter driven by our leadership in AI and momentum across the business. We are building, testing, and launching products and models faster than ever, and making significant progress in compute and driving efficiencies. In Search, advances like AI Overviews and Circle to Search are increasing user engagement. Our AI-powered Google Cloud portfolio is seeing stronger customer demand, and YouTube continues to be the leader in streaming watchtime and podcasts. Together, Cloud and YouTube exited 2024 at an annual revenue run rate of $110 billion. Our results show the power of our differentiated full-stack approach to AI innovation and the continued strength of our core businesses. We are confident about the opportunities ahead, and to accelerate our progress, we expect to invest approximately $75 billion in capital expenditures in 2025."

Here is the transcript of the earnings call.

That makes Google ad revenue increases this quarter, the previous quarter, the previous quarter, the previous quarter, the quarter before that and the quarter before that.

Here is a chart plotting Google's overall revenue, then ad revenue and then profit over the past several quarters:

Here is the snippet from the earnings report:

Google's overall revenue grew nearly 12% year over year, which is down from the more than 13% revenue growth that the company saw in the same quarter last year. While, fourth-quarter net income increased by more than 28% to $26.54 billion from $20.69 billion a year prior.

Here are some comments from Google's Sundar Pichai on X:

2/ AI Overviews are now in 100+ countries, and drive higher satisfaction + Search usage. Circle to Search is going great too. 2025 is going to be a big year for Search innovation as AI continues to expand the universe of queries people can ask.

— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) February 4, 2025

4/ … 4.4M devs are now building with Gemini. Vertex usage increased 20x during 2024. Waymo safely served 4M+ passenger trips, and is expanding to more cities. Read the full remarks here: https://t.co/Tcus8Gp9sb

— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) February 4, 2025

From Google's earnings call about ads in AI overviews -- which is like spotting Bigfoot right now :)

"We actually see monetization at approximately the same rate..."

Philipp Schindler -- Senior Vice President, Chief Business Officer:

"So, on your first question, first of all,… pic.twitter.com/rLdmU3x2Sj

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) February 5, 2025

Worth noting that AdSense revenue is the one segment of Google revenue that continues to decline

Another data point showing click outs to publishers decreasing in the AI Overview age pic.twitter.com/1ZmMFkFutV

— Nate Hake (@natejhake) February 5, 2025

Forum discussion at X.