Alphabet Announces Q2 Earnings and Google CEO as New Board Member

Alphabet has announced its Q2 earnings, netting a total revenue of $26 billion. This is up 19 per cent from $21.5 billion during the same period last year. These totals exclude traffic acquisition costs, which are the fees Google pays to online publishers that refer traffic to Google. Alphabet is the parent company of Google.

The rising revenue comes from increased mobile ad sales and YouTube videos. The popular video-sharing site has 1.5 billion monthly users. The market for digital videos is growing every year as online video merges with more traditional forms of advertising.

Alphabet’s profit is hurt by a $2.74 billion fine levied from European regulators due to Google’s practice of favouring its own online shopping service over competitors.

The company’s “other bets” section also contributed to the smaller increase in share price as it posted an operating loss of $977 million. “Other bets” include self-driving cars from X, smart homes from Nest and life-sciences technology such as sterile mosquitoes from Verily.

Alphabet also announced that Google CEO Sundar Pichai has joined the company’s already insider-heavy board of directors. The mega-popular search engine’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin also sit on the board.

Pichai became Google’s CEO when Alphabet was created in 2015. Since then there has been solid growth from Google while Alphabet has remained a bit stagnant due to its varying interests and accountability mandates. Pichai’s main focus has been machine learning and AI growth along with the creation of Google’s own branded hardware.

Pichai is the 13th member of Alphabet’s board of directors and will have the second Google vote along with Diane Greene, the senior VP of Google’s cloud businesses.