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A comment on Alphabet Backs GitLab's Quest to Surpass Microsoft's GitHub. Parent comment

Re:Alphabet Backs GitLab's Quest to Surpass Microsoft's GitHub by chatmasta on Thursday September 20, 2018 @07:47AM (#18031512)
To be fair to Google (and I say that as a massive skeptic), they are diversifying their business model, most notably by offering cloud services and developer tools. At one point 98% of their revenue was from advertising, and probably they saw the writing on the wall that it was time to diversify. Google Cloud seems to be doing well. I’m not sure what the revenue breakdown is now, but also not sure we can entirely call them an advertising company anymore.
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Re:Alphabet Backs GitLab's Quest to Surpass Microsoft's GitHub by baxtr on Thursday September 20, 2018 @07:55AM (#18031560)
Roughly 84% of their revenue is coming through ads. I think it’s fair to call them an advertising company

https://martechtoday.com/google-posts-31-1b-in-total-revenue...

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Re:Alphabet Backs GitLab's Quest to Surpass Microsoft's GitHub by flyinglizard on Thursday September 20, 2018 @08:06AM (#18031625)
And I'd say that a significant portion of the remaining 16% is a byproduct of platforms for selling ads (e.g. Android) or just monetizing infrastructure Google had anyhow to serve ad related services (GCS, Google Drive).

The one thing coming to mind which is not designed to boost advertising is their Pixel line (after they killed the rest of their hardware, of course) but even that is not as much of a standalone activity as it is a way to effectively steer the future of the Android ecosystem.

Ask yourself this: Which Google products or services would have justification as standalone P&L units, without collecting user data and sending it to the mothership? Not too many.

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Re:Alphabet Backs GitLab's Quest to Surpass Microsoft's GitHub by eitally on Thursday September 20, 2018 @12:37PM (#18033736)
Android

Cloud

X

Waymo

Play (the non-admob parts: app hosting/monetization, licensed content providing (music, movies/tv).

ChromeOS / Classroom

The entire Hardware division (which now includes Nest)

An awful lot of the Geo/Maps org is oriented away from direct advertising.

FWIW, you didn't ask, and my answer didn't include, other significant pieces of Google investment that are not remotely ad driven, like Deepmind & the entire RMI (Research & Machine Intelligence) organizations.

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Re:Alphabet Backs GitLab's Quest to Surpass Microsoft's GitHub by JepZ on Thursday September 20, 2018 @09:08AM (#18032090)
Once upon a time, Google was known for those low-distraction text-only banners...

What I am trying to say: The whole online advertising business would not be that creepy if Google and Facebook wouldn't compete on who can track more out of the web users. The reason why we call them an advertising company, is that their core actions are driven by their advertising business. Otherwise, you would consider calling them a search company ;-)

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