Alphabet shares Q3 revenue up 15% to $88.27 billion

Google may be facing some eye-wateringly high fines from Russian courts, and while we’ll likely never see those paid, parent company Alphabet sure has a lot of money sitting around at the moment. Today the company shares just how well it’s been doing, with the release of some very favorable Q3 2024 financial figures.

Overall, revenue is up 15% year-to-year from 2023, hitting $88.27 billion. Alphabet shares that YouTube ad revenue is up nearly a billion dollars alone, coming in at $8.92 billion. Between that and subscriptions, CEO Sundar Pichai tells us that over the past year, YouTube’s brought in over $50 billion, setting a new record for itself in the process.

Google lumps together its accounting for subscriptions, platforms, and devices — including Pixel phones — so it’s hard to get specific numbers on those from a report like this. But we do know that the group is up $2.31 billion from 2023, rising to $10.66 billion this quarter. Talking about the new Pixel 9 handsets, Pichai notes that the company has “seen strong demand for these devices.”

Cloud services continue to be huge revenue generators that are growing fast, with a 35% year-to-year gain. But even that can’t touch the might of Search, pulling in $49.39 billion to Cloud’s $11.35 billion.

Waymo gets a shout-out as the start among the company’s “Other Bets” projects, which altogether brought in $388 million. And on the Android side, Picahi shares some love for both Circle to Search and Google Lens — apparently Circle to Search is so popular that a solid third of the people who have tried it continue to use it at least weekly.

Maybe the biggest question for a lot of people is going to be how well the company’s substantial investments in all things AI have been paying off. That’s more than a little tricky to put a figure on — Alphabet’s report doesn’t even attempt to — because it’s just become such a pervasive component of nearly everything being worked on. But even without a clear number there, Alphabet communicates that it sees its current success as payoff from its investment in tech like AI. Specifically, the company points to places where AI has really helped streamline certain approaches, like coding — would you believe a solid 25% of Google code is now initially generated by AI (and later reviewed by engineers, of course)?

If Q4 comes in anything like Q3, Google is going to have one very nice 2024 to celebrate.