Inadvertently Leaked Earnings Report Leads to Shaky Trading Day for Google

From DailyTech: Today was a wild day for Google. Things started off on the wrong foot, as its earnings report was inadvertently leaked ahead of schedule. This little nugget of information provided within the earnings report sent Google's stock plunging during the trading day:

Average cost-per-click, which includes clicks related to ads served on Google sites and the sites of our Network members, decreased approximately 15% over the third quarter of 2011 and decreased approximately 3% over the second quarter of 2012.

This shows that Google is starting to lose money on its key moneymaker -- clickthroughs using AdWords. When investors caught word of this, the stock took a serious beating. At around the time the results were published early (around noon EST), the stock plummeted roughly $70, but slightly recovered throughout the trading day. By the closing bell, Google was down $60.49 or 8.01 percent.

Google's overall report paints a picture of rising costs and rising income -- which together have led to a slight slide in profitability.

Google is still working to stabilize its troubled acquisition, Android handset maker Motorola Mobility. The company poured $349M USD into restructuring the troubled asset, shuttering certain struggling regional units and committing to layoffs.

Motorola did pull in a decent chunk of cash, earning $2.58B USD for the quarter -- or roughly one-fifth of the $14.10B USD in total consolidated revenues for Google in its fiscal third quarter. But the bad news is that Motorola's revenue is back on a downward slide after a brief recovery to $3.3B USD in Q3 2011.

Traffic acquisition costs (TAC) -- the amount of revenue Google shares with advertising partners -- totaled $2.77B USD (26 percent of Google's revenue), up noticeably from the $2.21B USD (24 percent of total revenue) that Google shared in Q3 2011.

Across the board, other costs were on the rise as well -- advertising, administrative, sales/marketing, and research and development (R&D). R&D, for example rose from $1.4B USD last year to $2.0B USD this year. Google now employs 53,546 full-time employees (36,118 at Google and 17,428 at Motorola); that's up substantially from the just-slightly-over 33,000 Google employed in Q1 2012.

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