Google announced their earnings in a conference call. Financial details are in their press release here. Below are some of the more interesting quotes from Google CEO Eric Schmidt, co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and VP’s Jonathan Rosenberg, George Reyes and Omid Kordestani.
Eric Schmidt, Chairman of the Executive Committee and Chief Executive Officer
“We are ecstatic about our financial results this quarter. Our core business remains very strong. Even stronger is business growth internationally. It is the core business (Adwords/Adsense) that is driving our success.”
“Video via YouTube is hugely successful for us.”
“We are also expanding our business to offline media.”
“If you think about it user benefit is the key thing we focus on. Lots and lots of new products coming out and there is no end in sight.
We are still at the beginning of our core business of search. Lots of room for growth there. Our primary focus is on end user happiness and end user growth.”
“We don’t insist on a direct link for a product to generate revenue. This is the time that our model is scaling.”
“Clear Channel is not a remnant deal and includes a lot of prime ad time.”
“Google is building a tool to automate the YouTube video take down process. This makes it much quicker to get us to remove inappropriately uploaded content. These tools will get better and better over the next year.”
“As I reflect on the quarter Google is very much benefiting from the growth rate of the industry. We have benefited from the very hard work of advertisers, agencies and publishers. All of this is centered around the positive experience of our users. This is a scale business and the scale looks very good to us.”
Larry Page, Co-Founder & President, Products
“We have made many improvements in the quality and relevance of search.”
“We have also made great strides in moving people toward web computing.”
“We have made many improvements to YouTube and it is going gangbusters there.”
“We just know that the same principals that worked with site targeting in search can be expanded.”
Sergey Brin, Co-Founder & President, Technology
“We even have a partnership with some of the Presidential candidates at YouTube called YouTube08.”
“We have launched pay per action in beta. That is the easiest way for an advertiser to pay for advertising. It ultimately speaks to what advertisers want to get most.”
“This past quarter we announced a number of new partners for Google Checkout.”
“We have 75% of the top 20 social networks in our Adsense network.”
“We are very excited about our DoubleClick acquisition. With DoubleClick we think we can make more advertisers more efficient.”
“We also have been trying to make it easier for advertisers to advertise offline. Recently, we signed a partnership with Clear Channel.
Ultimately, it comes down to viewers and consumers. We believe fundamentally we can make advertising better by making them more relevant to viewers and readers.”
Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President, Product Management
“We have been building on quality components with our ads. These changes created more accurate quality based scores. We also added to the front of adwords to see if particular words were poor, good or great. This substantially improve the click through rate. We also worked on landing page quality scores.”
“Certainly a big story in the quarter is traffic and a big component is the Google Tool Bar. Tool bar users search significantly more.”
“The UK was very quick in moving ad spending to Google Adwords from TV.”
“Many of the improvements on a quality bases are reducing the quantity of ads and increasing the click through rate.”
“We have done a must better job of providing a unified log in across the Google properties. This has let us add a lot of value towards
personalization. We are starting an effort so that one boxes come up more frequently so that the user experience is seamless and integrated across all of our properties.”
“The more ecommerce in a country the more likelyhood you will see an opportunity for ad sales in a country.”
George Reyes, Senior Vice President & Chief Financial Officer
“We are doing a lot more deals and the deals are carrying a disproportion of tax. Generally the tax rates are going up or in that direction.”
Omid Kordestani, Senior Vice President, Global Sales & Business Development
“We are seeing the power of the platform. This push towards more efficiency is interesting to TV, radio and print companies. The market is very competitive but we are finding great interest. We will be very much focused on this space.”
“We are seeing strong growth in ad spending in the UK which I think is due to our management team. Also, the economy and sales team is very Strong there.”
