Digital news round-up: Google, Facebook, Amazon bring home the Q2 bacon (w/c 25th July)

Google, Face­book and Ama­zon wow mar­kets as Q2 tech rev­enues exceed every­one’s expec­ta­tions. And data and ana­lyt­ics prove to be a win­ning for­mu­la for sport.

Pat Hong By Pat Hong from Linkdex. Join the discussion » 0 comments

Incred­i­bly — this arti­cle will not men­tion Poke­mon GO. The weeks dig­i­tal news round-up in a cou­ple of min­utes:


After weeks of post-Brex­it doom and gloom in the eco­nom­ic news, it’s odd­ly com­fort­ing to hear that Google’s par­ent com­pa­ny, Alpha­bet, has report­ed a strong rise in Q2 rev­enues — a $21.5bn, or 21.3% increase.

To put these fig­ure in con­text, note that at the begin­ning of the week we final­ly had the con­fir­ma­tion that Ver­i­zon had acquired Yahoo for $4.83bn.

In fact, Q2 has post­ed some very healthy num­bers for the whole tech indus­try, with Face­book and Ama­zon also exceed­ing rev­enue expec­ta­tions — in the lat­ter case mak­ing Jeff Bezos the third rich­est man in the world.

Alpha­bet’s prof­it rise rise was part­ly due to a 29% rise in Google’s aggre­gat­ed paid clicks (indi­ca­tion that their recent rejig­ging of their paid ad lay­out is pay­ing div­i­dends).

No sur­prise then that Google CEO Sun­dar Pichai declared ear­li­er this week that “There’s an amaz­ing atmos­phere at Google”, and the com­pa­ny con­tin­ues to make head­way in con­fi­dent, dis­rup­tive ven­tures such as Google Fibre.

Per­haps it’s no won­der that Mark Zucker­berg, announced in Face­book’s Q2 earn­ing call that the social net­work are look­ing at expand­ing into the search adver­tis­ing space.

Data-driven = winning

Dig­i­tal mar­keters aren’t the only ones obsessed with data these days. With Chris Froome’s stun­ning third vic­to­ry in the Tour de France, ana­lysts have been bur­bling about how ana­lyt­ics played a piv­otal role the Team Sky suc­cess train.

Brails­ford’s approach to ‘mar­gin­al gains’ — the prin­ci­ple that when you make 1% improve­ments in a num­ber of areas, the cumu­la­tive gain ends up being much greater — is well known, and this year’s Tour de France fur­ther affirmed the pow­er of the con­cept.

Sky’s sheer dom­i­na­tion of this year’s tour cer­tain­ly makes a strong case for all of us to apply data-obsessed prin­ci­ples to many aspects of life, and it’s cer­tain­ly a les­son that is also being increas­ing­ly adopt­ed by Olympic teams in prepa­ra­tion for Rio.

Digital developments

A lit­tle clos­er to home, Google’s expand­ed text ads have rolled out, as has respon­sive ad func­tion­al­i­ty for native plat­forms.

And just in case you haven’t heard enough about the mete­oric rise of a cer­tain app… Pris­ma is build­ing on its top 10 posi­tion in the iOS App store by rolling out it’s prod­uct to new plat­forms. Android users going into the week­end will be pleased to know that they too can add all kinds of artis­tic fil­ters to their sum­mer pics.

Pat Hong

Written by Pat Hong

Editor at Linkdex/Inked, Linkdex

Pat covers the SEO industry, digital marketing trends, and anything and everything around Linkdex. He also authors Linkdex's data analysis and reports, analysing the state of search in various industries.

Inked is published by Linkdex, the SEO platform of choice for professional marketers.

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