The Californian group published Tuesday a turnover of 69.1 billion dollars in the third quarter, up 6% year on year.

Its net profit came out at 14 billion dollars, a result well below expectations.

Its title lost nearly 6% during electronic trading after the closing of the New York Stock Exchange.

From July to September, the world's number one online advertising company saw its advertising revenue increase very slightly, to $54.5 billion.

But advertising revenue from its YouTube platform fell 2% to $7 billion, as the market expected a small uptick.

"When Google stumbles, it's a bad sign for digital advertising in general," said Insider Intelligence analyst Evelyn Mitchell.

"This disappointing quarter for Google bodes tough times ahead if macroeconomic conditions continue to deteriorate."

"This is the first time that YouTube's advertising revenue has fallen since the group began publishing them separately at the end of 2019, mainly due to competition from streaming and short video formats" on mobile applications like TikTok, said she pointed out.

"Responsible Investments"

The Internet giant is suffering budget cuts from advertisers who are facing inflation and rising interest rates.

And its results suffer from the comparison with the year 2021, when the pandemic and health restrictions largely favored digital activities.

The meteoric rise of TikTok has also undermined the dominance of Google and Meta (Facebook, Instagram) in the global online advertising market.

In 2021, this entertainment app overtook Google as the most popular website in the world, according to Cloudflare, an internet infrastructure and services company.

"We are focused on clear priorities (...), on responsible investments over the long term and on a reaction adapted to the economic environment", declared Sundar Pichai, the boss of the Mountain View company, quoted in the press release.

"The product announcements we did just last month showed that," he said.

"We have significantly improved online search and the cloud, using artificial intelligence, and designed new ways to generate revenue from YouTube Shorts", a short video format copied from TikTok.

At the Code professional conference in September, the manager explained that he wanted to make his company more productive.

He had recognized that its gigantic size – nearly 187,000 employees as of September 30 – slowed it down in decision-making.

Clouds and smartphones

A month ago, Google announced the closure of its Stadia online video game platform, three years after the launch with great fanfare of the service which allows you to play without a console or computer, via the cloud.

At the same time, the company reaffirmed its ambitions in smartphones, with the launch of the Pixel 7. From July 2021 to June 2022, some 6.2 million brand handsets were delivered, an increase of 129% year-on-year, according to figures from the Canalys firm.

But the market share of Pixels at the global level remains tiny.

The group's remote computing business, Google Cloud, is also doing well: it continued to grow, with quarterly revenue of $6.9 billion, up from $5 billion in the same period. Last year.

But the heart of the American company's activity remains finely targeted advertising on a very large scale.

Google recently added a new tool to give Internet users more control over the content of ads that appear while browsing the Internet, hoping to reconcile with its billions of users, at a time when ads are mixing more fluid way to original content on platforms like TikTok and Instagram.

© 2022 AFP