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Google brought in $80bn for developers in 2019

Sibahle Malinga
By Sibahle Malinga, ITWeb senior news journalist.
Johannesburg, 04 Feb 2020
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai.

Google brought in over $80 billion in revenue for developers around the world last year, as the number of active monthly users of Google Play hit two billion.

This was the word from Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet, releasing the tech giant’s fourth-quarter and full-year financial results for 2019.

While Alphabet missed analysts’ profit estimates, the company’s revenue grew from $39.3 billion in 2018 to $46.1 billion in 2019.

YouTube's ad sales revenue grew 36% from 2018 to $15 billion in 2019, contributing 9% to the company’s total revenue. Google Cloud brought in $10 billion, up 53% year-on-year, driven by significant growth in Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Pichai pointed out.

The firm’s net income also expanded from $8.9 billion to $10.7 billion over the same time frame.

Through Google Developers, the tech giant’s platform for software development tools, Google provides developers across the globe with information, application programming interfaces, technical resources, discussion groups and blogs.

In March 2019, Googleintroduced a new way for Android developers to generate revenue from their mobile applications, through rewarded products, made available in open beta in the Play Console.

Pichai pointed out that developers across the globe are increasingly using multiple methods to monetise their apps and games through tools such as Android Studio, Android Virtual Device Manager, Eclipse,GameMaker: Studio and Instabug, among others.

“Google’s other revenue, Android, continues to thrive. I'm proud to announce that over $80 billion has been earned by developers around the world from Google Play, showing the popularity of our platform.

“There are now over two billion active monthly users of Google Play. Hardware is still in the early stages of delivering on our vision for ambient computing. Our home devices demonstrate how this vision can come to life in creating the home of the future, with our new Nest Mini and Nest Hub Max selling well over the holidays, following on from the Pixel 3a, which sold well last year.”

The Google Assistant now helps more than 500 million monthly users across 90 countries to get things done across smart displays, phones, TVs, cars and more, he continued.

YouTube’s upward trajectory

At $15.15 billion, YouTube revenue was up 36% from 2018 and nearly twice that of 2017.

“Now YouTube has over 20 million music and premium paid subscribers and over two million YouTube TV paid subscribers, ending 2019 at a $3 billion annual run rate in subscriptions and other non-advertising revenues,” noted Pichai.

“We expect substantial opportunity in direct response and brand advertisers for YouTube.”

Google Cloud ended 2019 at a more than $10 billion run rate, up 53% year-on-year, driven by significant growth in the GCP.

“The growth rate of GCP was meaningfully higher than that of cloud overall and GCP's growth rate accelerated from 2018 to 2019.

“We've always taken a long-term view investing in deep computer science and technology, important trends like the wider adoption and application of artificial intelligence, ambient computing and the move to the cloud, underlying our investments across Google and our other Alphabet companies.

“Our work in healthcare is a great example of how our investments in these areas allow us to deliver solutions across an entire sector.”

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