Google’s financial results are out: The company is still printing money, but ad prices are falling

BY Stefan Constantinescu

Published 31 Jan 2014

Those tiny blue links to cheap Canadian prescription drugs is how Google pays their employees. The company’s Q4 2013 financial results say that money made via those little blue links is up 31% compared to the same quarter a year ago. The problem is that the money earned from said links decreased by 11% during the same period. Wall Street doesn’t care, however, since they’re happy that Google just keeps on growing like an unstoppable imitation Viagra dispensing machine.

Looking at Motorola, which Google still owns until the governments of both the US and China approve the sale to Lenovo, they lost more than a third of a billion dollars. That compares to losing a quarter of a billion dollars in Q3 2014. Translation: Motorola is tanking, and Google couldn’t be more excited to get them off their books.

Will Google’s rise ever plateau? I’m not really sure. More and more people are surfing the web on devices like phones and tablets. Due to the smaller screens, you simply can’t display as many ads as you can on a personal computer. It’s painfully obvious that mobile ad rates are a small fraction of desktop ad rates, so what happens when the majority of web traffic comes from those little glowing rectangles we all carry with us?

On the flip side, Google is investing in so many projects, most notably driverless cars, that I’m positive the company will eventually find a revenue model that doesn’t have anything to do with mailing medicine from socialized countries to the United States.