Google CEO Larry Page spoke today on the company’s earnings call, following the fresh report for the second quarter, in which Google posted recored quarterly revenues of over $9 billion.
On the call, he dropped a few stats:
- Over 10 million people are on Google+ officially.
- Google+ is getting a billion items shared and received in a single day
- The +1 Button is being served 2.3 billion times a day
- Android is getting 550,000 phones activated a day (he said “phones” not devices, but not certain whether or not that includes tablets)
- 160 million Chrome users
He didn’t talk about search a whole lot, but he did bring up the fact that they’re now including author images in search results, indicating the emphasis the company is putting on “who you are” in search results. This also doesn’t make HubPages CEO Paul Edmondson’s approach of sub-domaining authors to dig out of the Panda hole seem too far-fetched.
Page said he views the company’s products as falling into three categories:
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1. Search and ads products – core driver of revenue for the company
2. Products employing high consumer success – YouTube, Android, and Chrome. “We are investing in these for the long term,” he said.
3. New products – Google+, Commerce, and Local . He said Google is “investing to drive innovation and adoption,” in these areas.
“Overall we’re focused on long-term, absolute profit and growth,” he added, reiterating a point he recently made in that “speculative” projects like driverless cars are not something the company is “betting the farm on,” though they might have a few going on at any given time.
“We’re only at 1% of what’s possible,” said Page.
In the earrings report, the company revealed that its headcount (as of the end of June) was 28,768, up from 22,316 at the end of March.
“We will optimize head count for the long-term,” he said. “We’re probably ahead of where we need to be with headcount growth.”
