Google’s advertising revenue fell by 4% in the final quarter of last year, marking the second time in the tech giant’s history that it has experienced a quarterly loss.
According to The Financial Times, the decline in ad sales came after a large decrease in Google’s business last year as economic growth slowed and the pandemic-fuelled rise in demand for digital services retracted.
Overall, in 2022 the Alphabet-owned company experienced growth of 1%, a small step up compared to the 32% rise Google declared in 2021.
As a result of the announcement of the quarterly figures, the company’s shares fell by 4% in after-market trading.
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The news comes a month after Google announced plans to cut 12,000 jobs in a bid to reduce costs. Google was “on an important journey to re-engineer our cost structure in a durable way”, chief executive Sundar Pichai said in a statement.
The tech firm will reportedly aim to focus its services more on products and technologies like Artificial Intelligence. Speaking for the first time since Chat GPT was launched – a possible search rival – Pichai added that Google would act “very soon” to give users a way to “interact directly with our newest, most powerful language models . . . in experimental and innovative ways”.
