Why do people talk about Google being an advertising company when, while it's a significant fraction of current revenue, it's also only a small portion of their interests and investments.

The first time you hear it, it sounds surprising. Then someone explains about revenue and it makes sense. So then you want to share the cleverness.

Of course, it's actually a pretty shallow analysis, unsupported by the company's history and inconsistent with some of the company's current behavior. How useful is it really to consider Google as being in the same equivalence class as TBWA\CHIAT\DAY? Well never mind, the meme is sticky!

You are trolling right? What is Google then? What's the in-depth analysis? Do you consider them some altruistic non-profit that just happens to sell ads in order to fund their "let's improve humanity" efforts?

Take a look at these:

http://bgr.com/2014/02/06/apple-google-microsoft-revenue-sou...

http://www.statista.com/statistics/266471/distribution-of-go...

https://www.wordstream.com/articles/google-earnings

Notice how even last year 89.5% of Google's revenue is straight up advertising. What else would you call them?

Or if you don't buy this argument let's try it by comparison. Is Zappos a shoe store? For sure, they did things differently and focuses on happiness of employees and customer satisfaction, but at the end of the day, they sell shoes. They have an interest in people buying more shoes and if they could, they'd certainly do something to make people buy more shoes. Substitute Google and ads in those two sentences. Just because they spend some minute portion of their profits on other projects doesn't make them anything but an ad company, even if they are a much more innovative ad company than the others you mentioned.

OK, Google is an ad company with a lot of hobbies. Better?

How about Google is a tech company that happens to sell ads. Better?

Hmm, no. Considering them an ad company helps to keep what they do for money on the forefront. Trying to push it down as some ancillary activity makes sense if you're marketing for Google, but not in any other situation.

It's difficult to tell whether you're a troll or just very attached to a single perspective. Yes, it makes sense to look at Google as primarily an ad company in some contexts--for instance, attempting to understand their business model. In other senses, Google has done a lot to distance themselves from being just an ad company, diversifying in image, product, talent, markets, and company culture. Probably more, but I don't know too much about the intricacies of what Google actually innovated on. Just by doing this, yes, I do think it is inherently dishonest to group them with other entities that do just resell web space. And I do not think that Google would cease to exist if people boycotted advertised products tomorrow, either, because their grasp of tech culture is so strong. People will always need analytics, retargeting, and profiling, so reducing an entire company to advertisers is downright insulting. Just the competition to ios alone has irreversibly changed the future of smartphones, mostly for the better.

Hell, just the market value of Google's brand is enough to distinguish them. You cannot buy that trust, you earn it by providing more value than an advertising brand could.

I am not using ads since somewhere mid 2009. For me they couldn't be less related to advertising. This is why I see them as a tech company.

I liked the first one.

> while it's a significant fraction of current revenue

That's why. They aren't doing anything out of the goodness of their hearts. If there's no money involved, at least tangentially, it's not something they are going to do.

Yea, but it's not like they are dedicated to making money advertising. They're dedicated to making money, period, and advertising is just the current mechanism.

"Ford is dedicated to making money. Making cars is just a way of doing that, so they are not a car company."

I'm tempted to agree. :)

Because right now they are an advertising company as their other investments are not significant revenue drivers, or are meant to provide additional audience data for advertising.

All of their interests and investments are all justified because it either drives people to look at advertisements or it generates more information about the users to make their ad platform more valuable.