Alphabet blows past Wall Street's Q2 quarterly earnings expectations as search and YouTube ad revenue surge

• Google's parent Alphabet announced its Q2 earnings Tuesday, beating Wall Street expectations.
• Alphabet reported $61.9 billion in total revenue versus $56.1 billion expected by analysts.
• Google's ad services brought in $57.1 billion, while Cloud revenue grew to $4.6 billion.

Alphabet blew past Wall Street's second-quarter earnings expectations as the company continued benefit from the massive uptick in digital commerce during the pandemic.

Shares of Alphabet were up around 3% in after-hours trading following its Q2 earnings.

Google's parent company brought in $61.9 billion in total revenue during the quarter, up 62% year-over-year, versus $56.1 billion expected by analysts.

A year after its first-ever revenue decline, Google's ad business skyrocketed in Q2 2021 with $57.1 billion in revenue, up 69% year-over-year, driven largely by Google search ads, which brought in $35.8 billion in revenue.

The company said advertising revenue at its YouTube division rose 84% year-over-year to $7 billion.

"The global shift to online video and streaming continues," Google chief business officer Philipp Schindler told investors on Tuesday's earnings call, adding that with 2 billion monthly users and 2 billion hours of video being watched on its services every day, Google is "at the forefront of this shift."

Schindler said YouTube TV is Google's "fastest-growing consumer service" and now has 120 million monthly viewers in the US alone, up from 100 million a year ago.

Google Cloud earned $4.6 billion in revenue and cut its operating loss to $591 million in Q2, its third-straight quarter of revenue growth since Google started separately reporting the financial performance of its cloud division in Q4 2020.

Here's what Alphabet reported, compared to what analysts expected, according to Bloomberg.

• Total revenue: $61.88 billion (Expected $56.03 billion, according to Yahoo Finance)
  • Revenue minus TAC: $50.95 billion (Expected $46.08 billion)
  • Google services revenue: $57.07 billion
  • Google Cloud revenue: $4.63 billion (Expected $4.34 billion)
• Net income: $18.53 billion (Expected $13.05 billion)
• Earnings per share (GAAP): $27.26 per share (Expected $19.35)

Tuesday marked Google's first earnings report since announcing in March that it would make a major shift away from precisely tracking individual users based on their internet activity, viewed by some experts as a move to entrench its dominance of the digital ads market.

Google's earnings also come as the company faces multiple antitrust lawsuits and likely a tougher regulatory environment under Biden appointees like Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan, as well as criticism from employees over its sexual-misconduct policies and dismantling of its AI ethics team following the departure of Timnit Gebru.