This Ad Tech Briefing covers the latest in ad tech and platforms for Digiday+ members and is distributed over email every Tuesday at 10 a.m. ET. More from the series →The recent rise of would-be adland challengers, such as OpenAI, and the expected hegemony of the social giant Meta have led to a comparative absence of the name “Google” from headlines in the media landscape as of late. Arguably, that’s just the way leadership at Mountainview likes it, as poring over their ledger books makes for more pleasurable reading than emails forwarded from their legal team as of late, as last week’s earnings disclosure from parent-company Alphabet will attest.
Alphabet’s $120 billion in Q2 revenues accounted for a 24% annual increase, putting the much spoken-of $1 billion, or €890 million, fine for breaching the EU’s Digital Markets Act (another key headline of last week) into perspective, with the numbers warranting further inspection, especially if we’re to get an insight into the priorities of Google – still its key engine.
Google has never defined itself as an advertising or media company, but to adapt a phrase popularly attributed to adland doyen Martin Sorrell: if the majority of your revenues come from media, then you’re a media company. And the most recent quarterly filings vindicate this notion, with the July 22 filings disclosing advertising revenues of $81.63 billion, or 68% of revenues for the period, representing 14.5% year-on-year growth – more on those comparative growth rates later.
