But it is true that the vast bulk of their revenue does come from ads. So it gets complicated.
If you were to take away their non-ad revenue, Google would be fine-ish. If you were to take away their ad revenue, Google would be in serious trouble.
Compare with Microsoft. Their biggest revenue source is Cloud services. And that's only about a third of their total revenue. And it also includes "server products".
Why is Google unable to diversify to the level of Microsoft? The products are ostensibly there, they just can't make money from them. Or the only money they can make from them are by virtue of selling ads on them.
Microsoft already had diverse businesses 40 years ago, and have "just" needed to maintain that. They're now diverse by default as long as not too many of those existing lines of business fail. No matter how successful a new business of theirs is, it's really hard for it to grow fast enough to threaten that diversity.
Because it all pales in comparison to what actually powers Google: ads. To the point that there are persistent and growing rumours that GCP may be if not on the chopping block, but greatly de-prioritised (it's part of the 26-billion Google Cloud).
It's also weird to me that people always look at revenue only. As if net income doesn't matter.
For example [1], non-ad business may have brought in 60 billion in revenue, but what it is I see: "The increase in other cost of revenues from 2021 to 2022 was primarily due to increases in data center costs and other operations costs as well as hardware costs." And that cost is 77 billion.
Guess what Google's the non-ad businesses are: "Google other revenues increased ... from 2021 to 2022 primarily driven by growth in YouTube non- advertising and hardware revenues", "Google Cloud's infrastructure and platform services were the largest drivers of growth in Google Cloud Platform."
So a large chunk of that revenue is eaten by the costs of generating that revenue. Google cloud lost 3 billion, other bets lost 6 billion etc.
Meanwhile all other costs of revenue are a 49 billion, compared to over 200 billion in revenue from ads.
So how do those businesses inderectly depend on ads? Ads business subsidises them. Despite the size of those other businesses very few, if any, are successful (as in: actually earn money).
[1] All quotes and numbers from Google's own 10-K: https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/20230203_alphabet_10K.pd...
Google's non-ads businesses are about $60 billion / year revenue. That seems like quite a lot!
To put it in context, that non-ads business would be in the top 20 for all tech companies by revenue. More than e.g. Oracle or Cisco. Roughly the same as IBM or HP. A bit smaller than Intel. Those are not small or unsuccessful companies (e.g. Oracle has 140k employees).
It actually seems pretty amazing that what HN thinks is Google's failed side hustle is comparable to the entire business of what would have been considered tech giants a few years ago.