Google Q4 revenue soars on higher mobile ad earnings

As Facebook showed last week, mobile ads are finally adding substantial revenue to companies involved in their distribution. The primary conduit for these ads, Google, announced its fourth quarter earnings today — well, its parent company, Alphabet did — and the numbers were encouraging.

In case you missed it, back in August Google became Alphabet, under which two main businesses, Google, and Other Bets, were portioned. Now a subsidiary of Alphabet, Google makes up the vast majority of its parent company’s revenue, while Other Bets, which includes Nest, Google Fiber, Google X, self-driving cars, and more comprised just a tiny portion.

Google’s revenues totalled $21.2 billion USD for the fourth quarter of 2015, up 18 percent over the same period a year ago. While advertising revenue made up $19.1 billion USD, just over $2.1 billion USD was made from other sources like Play, which includes Android’s app store.

Other Bets earned $448 million USD in the quarter, but had a $3.6 billion USD operating loss; the company is clearly pursuing some vital projects, most of which are expected to burn cash in the near-term.

Overall net income for Alphabet was $4.9 billion USD, up $300 million USD from the same period a year ago.

In an earnings call, Google’s new CFO, Ruth Porat, said that much of Google’s growth in 2015 came from “substantial strength in mobile search,” specifically calling out increased adoption of mobile devices during the holiday shopping season.

Google, like all U.S.-based companies, experienced an enormous revenue hit from the strong Dollar, since much of the company’s business comes from outside of the States.

While the company rarely mentions Android specifically during its press release, earlier today a report from The Information noted that Google plans to take further control of its Nexus line in the coming years in order to better compete with the iPhone.

[source]Alphabet[source]