Google reported its first-quarter results today, with earnings per share of $6.57 on revenue of $17.26 billion.
Analysts had expected Google to report somewhere around $6.60 earnings per share and roughly $17.5 billion in revenue. Like last quarter, Google missed the mark today, but investors don’t seem too upset by the miss. The company’s currently trading up by about three percent after-hours, after trading slightly up all day.
So, about that miss: Is Google in trouble? It depends on how you look at the company.
Google’s advertising business rests at the top of the food chain, and it brought in about $66 billion in revenue last year. Sixty six billion dollars. That’s enough money to buy Manhattan’s most expensive apartment 500 times.
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Google recorded over $15.5 billion in ad revenue over the last quarter alone. And that figure is up 11 percent from Google’s 2014 Q1 ad revenue.
But some investors are indeed worried. Google’s average cost per click — the money it makes every time you click on an ad — continues to decline (although the rate of decline is slowing). And Google’s aggregate paid-click growth continues to slow. These aren’t good trends, this isn’t a new problem, and the whole situation looks worse when you consider Google’s expensive, mysterious “moonshots,” including Glass, self-driving cars, and the long-awaited Project Fi wireless service.
So Google is at a crossroads, regardless of the company’s results today. We’re assuming investors will eventually pressure the company to reverse these trends. But today, it seems, they’re all right with slightly low results across the board.
