It's my time to shine... YouTube finally got its moment in the Alphabet earnings spotlight. First, the Google-parent reported a disappointing performance for its core search-ads biz. Then, for the first time ever, Alphabet revealed YouTube and cloud revenues (probably to distract from its buzz-kill ad earnings).
Back to the core biz... Google's an ad company. Its overall revenue, mostly made up of online ads, rose only 16.5%, sending shares down 5%. Profits still topped estimates though, thanks in part to an extremely low tax rate for the quarter. Alphabet set aside just $33M for taxes (0.07% rate), down from $1.1B in the same quarter last year.
YouTube may get milked... Despite the less-than-expected revenue, last month Alphabet became the 4th US company to hit a $1T valuation (that's 1,000 billions). But with success comes fresh challenges: government investigations threaten to break up Google's biz, while rivals like Amazon are gaining in the ad space. That could affect YouTube: