Google’s ad revenue is now north of $237 billion –more than the GDP of Greece. The tech giant’s ad server and ad exchange are ubiquitous, behind-the-scenes technology that helps websites make money, and it all dates back to its 2008 acquisition of DoubleClick.
While advertising remains the main revenue-generating segment for Google by running ads across the web by capitalizing on a tech footprint that touches nearly every web page on the internet, its DoubleClick’s acquisition provided a force multiplier.
Ari Paparo, a Google veteran shares his thoughts and experience with Big Tech War Stories about how the numero uno global search engine constructed its dominant web advertising business through the acquisition of DoubleClick:
DoubleClick was an American advertisement company that developed and provided Internet ad serving services from 1995 until its acquisition by the tech giant for $3.1 billion in March 2008.
DoubleClick offered technology products and services that were sold primarily to advertising agencies and mass media, serving businesses like Microsoft, General Motors, Coca-Cola, Motorola, L’Oréal, Palm, Inc., Apple Inc., Visa Inc., Nike, Inc., etc. They created a system to display banner ads across a network of websites and track their performance to better target internet users.
In 2023, 77.8 percent of Google’s revenue came from advertising on Google properties and YouTube. The Google Cloud revenue segment generated 10.8 percent of the company’s revenues.
In terms of geographic regions, for the fiscal year 2021, Google earned nearly 46% of its total revenue from the US, followed by the EMEA region (Europe, the Middle East, & Africa) with 31%, the APAC (Asia-Pacific) contributes 18% and 5% from Canada and Latin America.
