Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc has posted a 21 per cent jump in quarterly revenues year-on-year to US$26 billion despite last year’s brand safety scandals.
The report released by Alphabet showed that the search giant made US$22.6 billion from global advertising – 84 per cent of its overall revenue for the period.
However, the company noted a marked a fall in profits owing to a European Union-issued US$2.7bn anti-trust fine against Google for demoting rivals in online search advertising. Google has contested the EU’s ruling.
The figures also revealed that Google’s ad business remains strong despite recent concerns from some advertisers about where it’s been placing their ads. These concerns even led Havas to withdraw several client ads from Google and You Tube in the UK back in March.
These brands included Domino’s Pizza and Hyundai, who launched the boycott after a number of ads were placed next to content promoting extremism and hate speech.
Despite this, Alphabet chief financial officer Ruth Porat said that YouTube made a “healthy contribution” to its ad revenue growth between April and June.
She added that Google was making “strong growth with great underlying momentum, while continuing to make focused investments in new revenue streams”.
Google’s advertising revenue jumped from US$19.1bn in the same period a year ago to US$22.6bn.
In a recent report by Pivotal Research Group, 99 per cent of all new online ad revenue went to Google or Facebook in the third quarter of 2016.Together, Google and Facebook now account for 77 per cent of all online ad spending in the US.
