YouTube brought in $7.34 billion in advertising revenue during the second quarter, parent company Alphabet reported in its quarterly earnings on Tuesday.
The Q2 revenue was up only 4 percent on the video platform’s second quarter revenue of just over $7 billion in the same period of 2021. The Google parent increasingly looks to YouTube to be a global destination for entertainment, lifestyle and education content.
Alphabet reported $69.68 billion in revenue for the second quarter, up 13 percent from $61.8 billion in the previous year, and just coming short of an analyst estimate at $69.9 billion for the latest financial quarter.
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Alphabet reported net income of $16 billion, or $1.21 in earnings per share, compared to year-earlier net income of $18.5 billion, and per-share earnings at $1.36. Analysts forecast a $1.28 earnings per-share line for the latest quarter.
Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai in a statement underlined how the second quarter performance was driven by search advertising and cloud revenues. “The investments we’ve made over the years in AI and computing are helping to make our services particularly valuable for consumers, and highly effective for businesses of all sizes. As we sharpen our focus, we’ll continue to invest responsibly in deep computer science for the long-term,” he argued.
YouTube, one of the biggest online video platforms in the world, has continued its focus on short-form video through YouTube Shorts, which has a mobile offering competing directly with TikTok and posting rapid subscriber and viewership growth due to the platform’s built-in global reach.
On an analyst call, Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat pointed to an advertiser “pullback” in spending that would continue to impact YouTube in the current third quarter. She pointed to a tough comparison with the second quarter of 2021 for YouTube, when a rebound in ad spending coincided with the pandemic starting to ebb.
And Porat warned of “uncertainty” in the global economy. “We have seen pullbacks in spend by some advertisers; that was the biggest factor in the quarter-on-quarter sequential decline in the growth rate,” she added, as supply chain and inventory issues and the war in Ukraine also threw up headwinds.
At the same time, Porat insisted Alphabet was continuing to invest in YouTube and its users and creators for long-term growth.
