Those little search and contextual ads that Google sells continue to reap enormous benefits for a company that has, lately, provoked controversy, competitor enmity and copyright holder scorn. Google issued its Q1 07 earnings report this afternoon and the results are, as usual, superb.
Revenues rose 63% year-over-year to $3.7 billion while profits soared 69% to $1.0 billion.”We are ecstatic about our financial results this past quarter,” CEO Eric Schmidt said during the earnings call. “Our core business remains very strong.”
That’s about the size of it. Google sells ads and sells them very well. It helps that the company has introduced new image and video ads, but basically the finely tuned text-based search and contextual advertising engines keep Google in the money.
And from what I could see, there’s no sign of trouble on the horizon either. No aspect of Google’s business is slowing down unexpectedly and the search giant’s mound of cash-on-hand just keeps getting bigger. Google had nearly $12 billion in cash at the end of the quarter, compared to only $8.4 billion at the end of Q1 07.
In essence, then, the $3.1 billion in cash that Google is paying for DoubleClick still leaves Google with more cash on hand than it had a year ago. And Google clearly thinks that DoubleClick will boost its already hefty bottom-line even higher. “I think we realized how much of an efficiency there really was in online advertising,” co-founder Sergey Brin said during the earnings call.
One other interesting tidbit from the call: Schmidt said that press reports of Google’s content protection “tool” for YouTube were distorted. The “claim your content” option that Google is building won’t scan uploaded videos to find unauthorized content, as some press reports suggest. Instead, it will offer a more efficient way for rights holders to engage with the take-down process.
“It allows content owners to somewhat automate the take-down process,” Schmidt said. Despite this obvious attempt to ratchet down the expectations generated by the press reports, Schmidt said that the “claim your content” tool would “go a long way” to satisfying rights holders.
| Selected Google Financial Data ($ in 000s) | |||||
| 1Q06 | 2Q06 | 3Q06 | 4Q06 | 1Q07 | |
| REVENUES | $ 2,253,755 | $ 2,455,911 | $ 2,689,673 | $ 3,205,498 | $3,663,971 |
| COSTS AND EXPENSES | $ 1,511,056 | $ 1,640,619 | $ 1,758,342 | $ 2,144,904 | $2,442,762 |
| INCOME FROM OPERATIONS | $ 742,699 | $ 815,732 | $ 931,331 | $ 1,060,594 | $1,221,209 |
| NET INCOME | $ 592,291 | $ 721,077 | $ 733,361 | $ 1,030,716 | $1,002,162 |
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:27 PM | Print | Comments (0)
A debate is underway in the blogosphere about NBC’s decision to release only a portion of the videos sent to the network by Cho Seung-Hui. NBC wrestled with the decision to air any of the videos the killer recorded, and ultimately decided to release only a portion of the content.
Following outrage by relatives of the shooting victims and the wider Viriginia Tech community, NBC issued a statement defending its decision, noting that dark videos provide “some answers to the critical question, ‘why did this man carry out these awful murders?’”
Now the network apparently has decided to keep out of public view the full set of 28 video clips Cho mailed to NBC between his first and second bouts of carnage. The material is too disturbing, and no one wants to see Cho gain any further attention for his beyond-words awful deeds. No one wants to give Cho what he seemingly wanted: notoriety, stardom, recognition.
On top of this concern, some people think Cho’s videos will foster copycats. As Dave Winer points out, however, we’d all like to know what’s on those videos (the proverbial public’s right to know) and it’s unlikely that a imitator would be any more spurred on if the full set of videos were released.
We don’t know what’s on the videos. And do you think anyone who wanted to see them hasn’t seen enough to get the basic idea?
In addition, the Internet has changed the rules of the game. Jeff Jarvis makes the point that it’s almost a quaint notion these days that any news organization or information outlet should pick and choose what the public gets to know.
There is no control point anymore. When anyone and everyone — witnesses, criminals, victims, commenters, officials, and journalists — can publish and broadcast as events happen, there is no longer any guarantee that news and society itself can be filtered, packaged, edited, sanitized, polished, secured.
More information is almost always better than less information. Who knows? Maybe a highly astute psychologist would stumble upon an idea that unlocks the terrible mysterty of Cho if he or she gained full access to the videos. That knowledge, that insight, would pay off in averted tragedies down the road, sparing some other family the kind of heartache that too many families feel today. Maybe we’ll all learn a little something if we study his disturbed ramblings in full, something that we might not learn from only the hand-picked videos.
Granted, we will probably learn little aside from the fact that Cho was a very ill young man. But if there’s a chance, however tiny, that some new bit of knowledge can be obtained from the videos, they should be set free.
As for copycats, does anybody really believe that simple exposure to Cho’s videos would trigger another round of unthinkable horror? It might, actually, do the opposite. It might shock would-be violent offenders into realizing how pathetic someone like Cho was.
Cho obviously suffered from some sort of mental illness, fostered either by past severe abuse or a chemical imbalance or both. No amount of video viewing would encourage or inhibit violent behavior in someone so damaged. These kinds of killers are impervious to outside influences. Cho certainly seemed to be.
The only reason to not release the videos is to spare the victims’ families further pain. That’s a very good reason, but not good enough to outweigh the potential knowledge the videos might yield.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:51 PM | Print | Comments (0)
MarketWatch’s John Shinal has this report that an EU Advisory body has sent to Google warning the search giant that its privacy practices are not up to its standards. The Norwegian Data Protection Group, which is represented on an advisory body known as the Article 29 Working Party, sent the letter to Google in the wake of the company’s announcement that it is buying ad giant DoubleClick in a $3.1 billion deal.
Although it is not clear from Shinal’s article, the DoubleClick acquisition heightens privacy concerns because of the massive amount of data DoubleClick keeps on users’ activities regarding ad viewing, ad usage and so forth. Google’s position is that it has already tightened its privacy policies in a way that addresses concerns of the EU group.
The broader body, the Working Party, is apparently gearing up to send its own letter to Google. If Google is found to be in violation of an EU member’s national privacy laws, the company is subject to fines.
Google may or may not be engaging in privacy practices that aren’t up to snuff, but the EU shouldn’t be throwing stones. The powerful non-governmental body has itself come under scrutiny for issuing a directive that expands data storage requirements for telecommunications carriers, all in the name of fighting terrorism. Several EU members are going beyond even those expanded requirements to force, for example, identity verification for email accounts and to require phone companies to keep records of the precise locations of its mobile callers.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:25 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Every once in a while, someone gets arrested for piggy-backing on someone else’s Wi-Fi connection. Two people were arrested in the UK this past month for piggy-backing on apparently unencrypted Wi-Fi signals.
The official charge: “dishonestly obtaining electronic communications services with intent to avoid payment.” Neither person was prosecuted, however, and both were let off with a warning.
Admittedly the two signal thieves made their piggy-backing obvious by sitting in cars outside of people’s houses, activity that’s always unnerving. No wonder the police got involved. Still, busting people for simply hopping on an unencrypted signal to gain Internet access always strikes me as, well, ludicrous.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:49 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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