Google not only announced record earnings (OK, the real story would have been if they did not announce record earnings), it bought a Brazilian company as an R&D lab, and … it launched in China.
Now Google and China has been something of a fascination of mine, but I sense this is sort of a non issue now. And in any case, given that Google stole a key guy from MSFT, and then MSFT sued Google, and now Google is suing MSFT back, well, that’s certainly taking the headlines away from the whole “Is it evil or not to be in China” question.
Beyond Google’s moves, we had Yahoo’s earnings, which were inline, leading some to speculate that Yahoo’s results were disappointing (its stock did dive after). In a research report I just received (not online yet) Safa Rashtchy notes that the real story in Yahoo lately is how the company is monetizing across many revenue lines. “Over-reaction to Yahoo’s recent inline Q2 results provides an attractive buying opportunity,” he wrote. “Yahoo has shown consistent page view monetization growth over the last 10 quarters, increasing from $0.15 of revenue per average daily page in 1Q03 to $0.28 in 2Q05.”
Yahoo also launched a new rev of its index, more on that here.
Meanwhile, today MSFT launched MSN Virtual Earth, its answer to Google Earth. I love that we have massive companies competing to give us Superman views of the tops of buildings.
There’s much more, but I have to run for the morning. More soon. It’s good to be back.
It seems more like an answer to Google Maps than to Google Earth. Lots of Microsoft PR seems to indicate otherwise, and I’ve actually seen reviews that say “Unlike Google Earth, you won’t need a client!”, but so far Virtual Earth is inline with what Google Maps does, and is a fair ways off from Google Earth.
Revenue per pageview is an interesting metric, but what does “revenue per average daily page” mean (in the analysis of Yahoo’s earnings)?
If I make one cent per pageview, is that 91 cents per “average daily page” across a quarter?
If so, then the stated 28 cents equates to only 0.3 cents per pageview, or a CPM of $3.
In 2001, I computed that Yahoo made 0.2 cents per pageview, so if they make 0.3 cents now, that’s a nice 50% increase over a period of about four years. (But during 1998-2000, they made 0.4 cents per pageview, so they are not back to the high point yet.)
Of course, the number of pageviews must be up dramatically since the old days.
I did the revenue per page view calculation too as a CPM of 280 seemed way high.
In the slides for the conference call (p 10) Yahoo said that they ended Q2 with 3.2 billion page views per day. That means approx. 280 billion page views for the quarter and revenue per page view of $0.003.
You missed commenting on News Corp.’s acquisition of Intermix Media, Inc., majority-owner (and soon to be sole owner) of MySpace.com, John. Would be interesting to hear ytour thoughts on this just as I have commented here.
Glad you’re happy to be back. 🙂
Ciao,
Doug
Following up on Yahoo: I followed Henrik’s lead to the slides for the conference call and compared to the equivalent numbers for Q2 2001.
During these four years, the annualized grwoth rates for Yahoo’s numbers were as follows:
Revenues: 48% per year
CPM: 15% per year
Pageviews: 28% per year
Even though revenues = CPM * pageviews, you can’t add up the 15% and 28% to get 48%, because we are talking about annualized growth rates (i.e., exponential formulas, not linear).
Conclusion: even though it’s important to increase the extent to which each pageview is monetized, it was about twice as important for Yahoo to simply increase the use of their services.