Filed under: Good news, Products and services, Competitive strategy, Google (GOOG), Marketing and advertising, Abbott Laboratories (ABT)
It’s hard to imagine that a single website could bring in so many visitors every day, but if we are to believe a recent report that analyzed metrics from web analysis firm ComScore, Google, Inc.’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) YouTube property is doing just that. According to JMP Securities, Google has accomplished quite a bit of growth from the July 2006 period to the July 2007 period. Should Yahoo, Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) and Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) be worried at these Google growth numbers in the last year?
- Worldwide users up 20%
- U.S. users up 18% (now 22% of 552 million global total)
- Time spent on sites up 113%
- Page views up 56%
- Google Maps up 98% to 682 million, crushing Yahoo’s 397 million (which is up 32%)
Those numbers, if validated, are hugely significant. Google’s command of the time spent on the internet is increasing in a large way, and with the possible fact that Google’s YouTube is commanding 28% of the total minutes spent on Google’s global web properties, what is next? How about less revenue for starters? YouTube is not nearly as profitable as Google’s cash-cow AdWords system, which brings in nearly all of Google’s current barn-burning revenue every quarter. If more and more eyeballs shift to YouTube instead of Google Search, will Google’s revenue suffer? Maybe.
Google has to figure out a way to make YouTube (and other public properties that are popular) profitable in a growing way. It’s just now starting to experiment with this, adding ads to YouTube (to the chagrin of many customers) and it will inevitable try other ways to sift advertising revenue from the YouTube property. If it doesn’t, a revenue crimp from the company may be a result in future quarters. Well, that is, if AdWords stops growing as a revenue source, which probably won’t happen.
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