Alphabet continued its hot growth streak in the second quarter of 2017 with more than $26 billion in total revenue, up from $21.5 billion during the same period last year.
The ad giant saw its operating income decrease from about $6 billion in Q2 2016 to $4.1 billion a year later due to a $2.7 billion fine from the European Union that accrued in the previous quarter.
It’s a heavy enough fine for even Alphabet to feel, but hardly dampens Google’s roaring engine. The company’s search, ad network and YouTube ad revenues were up $2.5 billion from the previous year, and headcount grew almost 15% to more than 75,000 employees.
Of the 9,000 new employees, the “vast majority” fill engineering and product roles, with a heavy focus on services for the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), according to CEO Sundar Pichai.
In Q2, the company tripled the number of GCP customer deals worth more than $500,000 compared to last year, a sign of the business’s enterprise growth and focus.
Google is also filling out its services with expanded attribution. For instance, Pichai said the company has now measured more than six billion store visits and is “instrumental in understanding customer behavior that starts online and ends in store.”
And while cloud services represent a new growth category, YouTube has solidified its position as a mature, powerhouse asset.
Google’s digital video platform now boasts 1.5 billion monthly viewers across all devices and mobile viewers average 60 minutes of content per day.
“The fastest-growing screen for YouTube is in the living room,” where total watch time has doubled since last year, Pichai said.
Alphabet also announced Monday that Pichai, who was promoted to top Googler in 2015, will join the holding company’s board of directors.
“Sundar has been doing a great job as Google’s CEO, driving strong growth, partnerships and tremendous product innovation,” said Google co-founder and Alphabet CEO Larry Page in a press release.
