The most interesting number from Google's earnings had nothing to do with advertising
Google parent company Alphabet just beat Wall Street expectations on its Q2 earnings, sending its stock up about 5% after-hours.
Its cash cow — ad revenue — grew a healthy 19.5% year-over-year, while "Other Bets" like Nest and Verily continued to lose money on small revenue gains (losses of $859 million on revenue of $185 million).
But there was one area where the company did show strong growth that wasn't related to advertising: Google's "other revenues."
That's where the company lumps together its cloud business, Play store revenues, and hardware sales.
This quarter, it hit $2.17 billion, up 33% year-over-year. That's better than the 24% growth it saw last quarter, or the 24% the quarter before that, or the 11% growth in the third quarter of last year.
On the earnings call, CEO Sundar Pichai said that that growth was driven primarily by Cloud and Apps, followed by Play, and then hardware (Pichai said Google has now sold 30 million Chromecast streaming devices in total, which means it's sold 5 million of the gadgets since June).
This strong growth comes nearly a year after Google hired Diane Greene to help it amp up its cloud business. Looks like it's working.
The company has said that it ultimately sees its enterprise business as being more important than its advertising business (and it even expects cloud revenue to surpass ad revenue as soon as 2020).
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