San Francisco (AFP)

The pandemic has done well for Google and the lifting of health restrictions also bodes well for the internet giant, which benefits both from online consumption and physical economic activity.

Alphabet has far exceeded market expectations with a net profit of $ 18.5 billion in the second quarter, almost triple last year, according to a statement released Tuesday by the parent company of Google.

The number one in digital advertising has garnered nearly $ 62 billion in revenue, thanks to communication spending by small and large companies on the search engine, on YouTube and on its applications like Google Maps.

"Distribution was again by far the biggest contributor to year-over-year growth for advertising," Philipp Schindler, Google vice president of sales, said on an analyst conference call. .

“The travel, financial services, media and entertainment sectors were also very involved,” he added.

Google had suffered from its exposure to the tourism sectors, at half mast a year ago because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“In 2020, the second quarter was the lowest point of the year for the online advertising market, so the annual comparison is favorable for Alphabet,” noted Nicole Perrin, analyst at eMarketer.

- Ransom of glory -

With the vaccination campaigns, the group benefits from the best of both worlds: the success of online commerce does not weaken despite the relaxation of health restrictions and travel resumes.

Advertising revenue is therefore flowing again.

“During the past year, we have returned more traffic to third-party websites than in any other year,” said group boss Sundar Pichai at the conference.

"We have generated billions of connections like phone calls, directions, meal orders and reservations which have brought consumers and revenue to businesses around the world trying to recover from the crisis," he said. he insisted, anxious to restore the image of his group accused of hindering online competition.

Several lawsuits have been launched in recent months against Google for abuse of a dominant position.

The latest date of July 8: 37 American states have filed a lawsuit against the company, which they accuse of using anti-competitive methods to discourage the distribution of applications by means other than its Play Store, pre-installed on all Android smartphones, the dominant mobile operating system in the world.

But these attacks do not for the moment overshadow its economic model.

- The billions of YouTube -

The California giant is expected to generate $ 130 billion in advertising revenue this year, 25% more than in 2020, according to eMarketer.

It will thus retain the largest share of the digital pie, 28.6%, just ahead of Facebook.

In this area, YouTube particularly stands out.

Its revenues climbed 83% year on year, to more than $ 7 billion, close to that of Netflix.

The video platform has reached 2 billion monthly viewers worldwide.

This represents nearly 64% of the audience for online videos, according to eMarketer.

And daily views on YouTube Shorts, a short format service designed to compete with the popular TikTok app, topped 15 billion this quarter, Sundar Pichai said.

The boss also returned to the avalanche of cyber attacks that recently affected many businesses and organizations.

"This sounded the alarm bells for the industry (...), companies have really started to think deeply about their flaws," he said.

He is therefore counting on opportunities for Google's cloud service, which comes third in remote computing, far behind the two leaders Amazon and Microsoft.

© 2021 AFP