Champagne corks were firing off at Google like a military salute as the Internet search engine kings revealed that their profits had jumped more than 300 per cent in the second quarter this year.
Fuelled by continued growth in Web advertising, Google raked in a revenue of $1.38 billion (~£788m ~€1.13bn) its second 2005 fiscal quarter, up 98 per cent compared with the same period last year.
Once you take off the $494 million (~£282m ~€406m) paid by Google to its ad network partners (known as traffic acquisition costs), revenue racked up to a wallet-delighting $886 million (~£506m ~€728m).
Net income came in at $343 million (~£195m ~€282m), favourably comparing with the $79 million (~£45m ~€64m) recorded in 2004’s second quarter, while revenue from Google sites totted up to $737 million (~£421m ~€606m) – up a thumping great 115 per cent.
Revenue from Google ad network partners was similarly rosy, totalling $630 million (~£359m ~€518m), an increase of 82 per cent.
“We are very proud of our results. Business is very good here at Google,” said chief executive Eric Schmidt, dodging the flying champagne corks. “It’s really because we’ve figured out ways to stay focused on end users and innovation.”
Although the vast majority of Google’s revenue comes from paid advertisements on search results pages and on partner sites, the company has been diversifying with new products and services like video search and mapping.
The company’s fortunes are currently on a stratospheric trajectory, with April’s first-quarter profit almost six times higher than a year earlier.
Not surprisingly, Google’s share price has soared, nudging above $300 (~£171 ~€246) a share for the first time last month and giving the company the honour of being the world’s biggest media group by stock market value.
Recent figures from Nielsen/NetRatings revealed that Google has attracted in excess of 78.5 million US visitors last month, up 25 per cent from a year ago, with the Google and Blogger brands ranked numbero uno in search and Web hosting, respectively.
Meanwhile, Yahoo had to make do with cheapo Cava as figures posted on Tuesday revealed a higher second-quarter profit but with revenue falling short of analyst expectations.
This news sent Yahoo! shares tumbling down as much as 10 per cent in after-hours trading.
TV advertisers and execs could be heard blubbing into their double tall skinny lattes all over Soho as a new survey revealed that around 90 percent of current users fast-forward through ads.
With more and more consumers buying digital video recorders (DVRs), this could spell disaster for the advertising industry.
Although the technology is still bubbling under the mainstream, BSkyB says about half of new subscribers opt for its Sky+ DVR, and with cable companies selling DVRs that are built into set-top boxes, advertisers are set for a bumpy ride ahead.
Long shunned as hobby-obsessed lonely losers living in messy bedrooms with a dreadful taste in music, geeks, computer spods and sci-fi nuts have revealed themselves as a lucrative target for advertisers.
The bigwigs of Sci-Fi conducted the research to try and work out the popularity of the multi-billion dollar genre when it was supposedly the province of “solitary, unpopular individuals with niche interests and questionable personal hygiene habits.”
The bit that will get the advertisers moist in their strap lines is the fact that geeks are 90% more likely to be the first among their chums to invest in new products.
NTL’s claim that 300K broadband offer was “more than 5 times faster than standard 56K dial-up internet” has been happy-slapped down by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), who condemned it as being in breach of TV Advertising Standards Code.
The telecoms giant insisted that it was standard industry practice to refer to the speed of broadband only in terms of download speed and, to back up their case, readily snitched on a host of competitors making similar claims.
The European Commission has announced plans to create a single set of European Union rules on broadcasting and the wireless spectrum.
Europe is also looking to free up the highly lucrative wireless spectrum – currently worth something like €9 billion (~US$11bn ~£6bn) a year – and hopes that digital frequencies used by services such as mobile phone operators, police radar and radio will be brought under centralised EU control by the end of 2005.
Back in the old days when Glastonbury was a field of medieval mud occupied by confused hippies and LSD travellers, the customary way to show your appreciation of the band was to flash the occasional peace sign or waft a spliff skywards.
For today’s hi-tech toy generation, new ways of bigging up a band have developed.
We’re not sure what the remaining 90% of the crowd thought of this pointless onscreen nonsense, but we’d be reaching for our phone zappers in double quick time.
UK’s first video mobile network, 3, has announced the first advert to be broadcast over a 3G service.
The clip will be launched in mid-May and made available via ‘Today on 3’, with the first 100,000 customers able to download the clip for nowt.
Pamir Gelenbe, co-founder and Director of Corporate Development, Flytxt was equally chuffed: “We’re delighted to be working with 3, the UK’s leading 3G network on such an innovative approach to mobile marketing and advertising. The advantage for brand owners is that mobile marketing combines the wide reach of TV with the precision of DM and the tracking potential of the Internet. ”
In a quest to blast their already soaring profits further up into the stratosphere, Google will test a cost-per-impression bidding model for AdWords ads, letting advertisers specify groups of sites or specific sites in Google’s ad network.
Google has, however, promised limitations on the animated advertising fluff that can appear on their adverts, with blinking ads that continuously loop already declared verboten.
The search engine heavyweights are hoping that the approach will appeal to advertisers who are fussy about where their brand appears or are aiming for a certain niche demographic.
Champagne corks were popping like manic machine gun fire at Google yesterday as the company reported a thumping fivefold increase in profits in the first quarter.
Revenues generated from Google’s partner sites through its AdSense programs generated $584 million, or 47 percent of revenues, – a hefty 75 percent increase over partner-related revenues a year ago.
Last week, 250 executives from advertising agencies, game developers and publishers swarmed into the first annual Advertising in Games Forum on 14 April 2005 in New York City.
For the benefit of buzzword-deficient execs, Yankee Group senior analyst Mike Goodman explained that this hideous word describes what you get when advertisers create a game around a product rather than place their brands within a well-known title.
Fact-bloated attendees also learned that the top selling 2004 game titles (according to the NPD Group) were: