It has been a good week for Google, but a bad week for Yahoo!
Google, the search giant, has confirmed its ongoing market domination by announcing that its third quarter profits have almost doubled. From July to the end of September, its net income was $733m (approximately £390m), a 92% increase on the $381m it made in the same time last year.
Google’s latest financial results beat market expectations, with Google’s revenues rising 70% from a year ago to $2.7bn.
Yahoo!, meanwhile, reveals a drop in advertising revenue and associated fall in net profits. There is some good news with the confirmation that the long awaited Panama platform is nearing completion, but the strength of Google in the market cannot be doubted.
An in depth report from eMarketer.com, an online research company, paints a rosy picture for Google whilst it must be depressing reading for its competitors. The report predicts that Google’s US ad revenue growth rate in 2006 will soar almost 65% over last year’s. Yahoo! still shows a healthy 17.5% growth rate, but this appears weak when compared to Google, which is expected to pocket 25% of all internet ad revenue in the US.
Will it ever end? Google marches on and it is hard to see where the competition will come from. We wait with anticipation to test the new Panama system (Yahoo!’s PPC platform) but fear that it will take more than a long overdue improvement in technology.