Google’s earnings are a ‘bad omen’ for digital ad industry
FILE – In this Oct. 22, 2014, file photo, Google co-founder Billie Jean King, left, with co-founder Sergey Brin, holds up a photo of King with fellow Google co-founder Sergey Brin, right, at the company’s annual developer conference in San Francisco. Google CEO Sundar Pichai will address shareholders today about the company’s second quarter earnings results. The earnings will be released at 8:50 a.m. PT. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma, File)
NEW YORK — Facebook and Google may be both more profitable than they were when they were small and unknown in tech, but one of them is far more successful than the other.
It was Facebook, not Google, that grew the most, thanks to acquisitions and acquisitions-related revenue as well as their efforts around mobile ad targeting. As Google gets comfortable with the way it’s structured and can build the ad-selling platform it needs to enter the $500 billion to $1 trillion marketplace, Facebook is clearly going to continue to find itself on the leading edge of a company-wide evolution.
As much as the market is focusing on the power of mobile, Facebook is the master of the Internet and the personification of everything we wish for the Web age to become.
“I don’t want to build my business on Google, because I don’t see Google as the next big thing,” said Scott Kessler, chief executive at News Corp.
“I want to build an Internet company, and by that I mean this giant search portal and content company that has billions of users worldwide and that has the platform to monetize content and has the ability to put the right products and right advertising in front of them,” Mr. Kessler said on a panel at the Reuters Innovation Summit in New York.
Mr. Kessler spoke as Facebook announced a blockbuster acquisition of Instagram, its photo-sharing network, for about $1 billion.
Google is now focused on the growing importance of digital advertising to online revenue and the ad business as a whole.
The company’s stock prices are down a bit this year from a big run at its IPO, but they rose more than 10 percent over the same period last year.
This month, Facebook reported second-quarter earnings of $2.6 billion, and was far
