On the occasion of the first anniversary as the chief executive officer, Larry Page shared a letter with Google’s (s GOOG) investors. He took over the CEO job at last April after making the announcement in January 2011. You should read the letter for yourself. It is a bit of corporate-speak, but nevertheless it feels like it is from a guy who feels happy with his first 12 months in the job. While reading the letter, some stats caught my eye that are simply staggering, regardless of how one feels about the company.
- Over 850,000 Android devices are activated daily through a network of 55 manufacturers and more than 300 carriers.
- Google Chrome browser has over 200 million users.
- Google launched Gmail in 2004 and now is used by more than 350 million people. Over 5,000 new businesses and educational establishments sign up for Gmail every day.
- YouTube has over 800 million monthly users who upload an hour of video per second.
- Google’s mobile advertising grew to a run rate of over $2.5 billion by the third quarter of 2011 — two and a half times more than at the same point in 2010.
- Google has paid out over $30 billion to support content on the Web since the launch of Adsense over a decade ago.
- Google Translate is eight years old and according to Page “now allows anyone to translate text in an instant between any two of 64 languages—including Hindi, Arabic and Chinese. That’s actually 4032 different pairs of languages you can translate!”
Of course what would the letter be without the CEO pointing out his achievements. Page wanted to focus the company on social and optimize the operations around fewer products. So it isn’t a surprise that he pointed out that “we have closed or combined over 30 products, including projects like Knol and Sidewiki.”
And as for Google+, the mandate for the company, Page pointed out that there are “over 120 Google+ integrations to date (including Google Search, YouTube and Android), we are on the right track. Well over 100 million users are active on Google+.”
Over 100m users on google+
Interesting, wonder how many are unique on G+, and what’s the usage on a daily basis.
Look at the sharing button right below this article. Currently 272 tweets, 75 Linkedin shares, 110 FB likes, and only 32 Google +1’s. Google+ is struggling, has been struggling, and wouldn’t even be alive if Google didn’t have stupid money propping it up.
It was a nice take on social networking but not wanted or needed in the market at the moment. I think if they were able to try this when MySpace was still king it would have taken off a lot better.
While all these are very nice statistics to know, these don’t provide much visibility into Google’s future revenues.
There are few statistics, which Google won’t disclose, but can help Investors with some visibility/predictability of Google’s future revenues: How many customers (advertisers) Google has? How the number of customers has increased over time? What is the average revenue per customer? What is the revenue split between search, display, and mobile advertising? How is it changing over time?
Google generates over 96% of its revenues from advertising and this has remained true for last several years. Though Google has evolved its Search offering, got into Mobile space, trying to get into Operating systems, and has build offerings for the Enterprises, any of them has not yet resulted into major revenue streams. Apple, on the other hand, earned 70% of the revenues from products (iPhone and iPad) that didn’t existed 5 years ago. Can Google do that? Can Google innovate its Business Model so that 50% of revenues in 2017 will not come from advertising, but from Google new value propositions in next 5 years?
Jitender Miglani
http://www.bmimatters.com
IMO Google should buy Reddit, Github and perhaps StackExchange. They’re trying to go social all at once with a top-down strategy when instead they should be cultivating communities that are part of their DNA.
Over 100 M users active on G+? I wonder what their definition of “active” is… I’m guess it’s very close to “has an account and has logged in at least once since the launch of G+.” Don’t get me wrong