Google acquired an emerging video hosting site YouTube in 2006 for an estimated USD 1.7 billion. Everyone one knows that YouTube has grown many folds since then, probably more than what Google had anticipated while purchasing it. But the company never talked about YouTube revenue numbers for some unknown reasons. But Alphabet, the parent company of Google, has finally revealed how much YouTube is making from ads. According to Alphabet, YouTube earned USD 4.7 billion in the fourth quarter of 2019. Keeping this figure in mind, it is expected that the video site made around more than USD 15 billion from ads in all of last year. This is around 10 per cent of total revenue earned by Alphabet throughout the entire year. This does not include revenue from other sources like subscriptions.
Google has also disclosed revenue generated from its cloud service, which is trying to challenge the likes of Microsoft and Amazon in the business. According to the search engine giant, it earned USD 10 billion in annual revenue from cloud business. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said he is pleased with the growth in newer areas like Cloud and YouTube. In the last quarter of 2019, the cloud-computing unit of Google reported revenue of USD 2.6 billion. This was up by 35 per cent when compared to the revenue generated in the same quarter a year ago. It was USD 1.7 billion in the third quarter of 2018. This is definitely a piece of good news for Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud. He has completed his first year in this position.
However, the revenue shows that it is still far behind major players in the cloud market. Amazon Web Services earned USD 9.9 billion in the most recent quarter. Microsoft has not been disclosing specific revenue figures for its cloud platform Azure. Some reports claim that Google has disclosed these figures to deflate bad news in the revenue report. It is being said that the last quarter of 2019 was the worst since 2015.
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