The world’s biggest company has blamed little crypto for missing its earnings as YouTube’s ad revenue saw a fall of 2% to $7.07 billion. Analysts expected an increase of 3%.
“We did see some advertiser pull back in certain areas in search ads,” Philipp Schindler, Google’s Senior Vice President and Chief Business Officer, said in the earnings call before adding:
“In financial services, in the areas of insurance, loan, mortgage, crypto subcategories. And we also noted a pullback in spend by some advertisers on YouTube and Network.
And these pullbacks in spend increased in the third quarter.”
Earnings per share were expected at $1.25, but came at $1.06. Revenue was expected at $70.66 billion, but came at $69.08 billion.
Their growth rate of just 6% is the weakest since 2013, with the strengthening dollar blamed for 5% off revenue growth.
Their stock has fallen by 6.58% in after hours trading, raising concerns about a slowdown in tech overall while banks boom with $100 billion gains from interest rate rises.
Schindler however did not quite elaborate just what role crypto had in any of this, but he mentioned the word twice.
“In the third quarter, we did see a pullback in spend by some advertisers in certain areas and search ads,” he said. “For example, in financial services, we saw a pullback in the insurance, loan, mortgage and crypto subcategories.”
The crypto industry struck many multi-million dollar deals last year, including for prime time advertising during the Super Bowl.
This mention of crypto during the Google earnings call for the first time suggests the industry has now become big enough to notice.
On YouTube especially there were many streamers during more bullish times, with Google seeing crypto as a growth area especially for their cloud business.
They struck a deal with a VC company recently to invest in crypto startups, in addition to teaming up with COINBASE to offer crypto payments.
