Motley Fool
Alphabet’s Ad Business Slows to a Trickle. Time to Sell?
Coming into Alphabet’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) third-quarter earnings report on Tuesday night, there were already signs that growth would be sluggish. Fellow digital advertising stock Snap said revenue growth slowed to just 6% in its third quarter, and Alphabet management had already warned about macroeconomic uncertainty in its second-quarter earnings report. While Google Cloud and the projects in the “other bets” segment, like the autonomous driving service Waymo, get some attention from investors, Alphabet is fundamentally an advertising business, and advertising makes up essentially all of its profits, as Google Cloud and other bets lose billions of dollars each year.